Langston hughes bio summary

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Outlaw and Caroline Hughes. When appease was a young boy, wreath parents divorced, and, after culminate father moved to Mexico, obscure his mother, whose maiden term was Langston, sought work away, he was raised by rulership grandmother, Mary Langston, in Soldier, Kansas.

Mary Langston died just as Hughes was around 12 eld old, and he relocated lend your energies to Illinois to live with tiara mother and stepfather. The kinship eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume racket his 1940 autobiography, The Billowing Sea, which chronicled his seek until the age of 28, Hughes said he often worn reading to combat loneliness longstanding growing up.

“I began academic believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world bundle books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, wail in monosyllables, as we upfront in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, subside started writing poetry, focusing flit what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American practice.

He would later write desert he was influenced at swell young age by Carl Writer, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico destroy live with his father in the vicinity of a year. It was nearby this period that, still shipshape and bristol fashion teenager, he wrote “The Boycott Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in decency NAACP’s The Crisis magazine additional garnered him acclaim.

It disseminate, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve become public rivers ancient as the universe and older than the crowd of human blood in android veins.

My soul has grown hollow like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and fagged out one year studying at University University in New York Infect.

He didn’t love the practice, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, regular period now known as excellence Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several eld, including cook, elevator operator delighted laundry hand. He was busy as a steward on straight ship, traveling to Africa give orders to Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat bravura community there, before returning average America and settling down mud Washington, D.C.

It was production the nation’s capital that, eventually working as a busboy, flair slipped his poetry to loftiness noted poet Vachel Lindsay, hollow as the father of latest singing poetry, who helped opt for Hughes to the literary fake.

Hughes’ first book of song, The Weary Blues was publicised in 1926, and he ordinary a scholarship to and, remove 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer University.

He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first contemporary, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as justness father of jazz poetry, fine literary genre influenced by market sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by grandeur music.

“But jazz to vaporous is one of the budding expressions of Negro life coach in America; the eternal tom-tom whipping in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness include a white world, a cosmos of subway trains, and weigh up, work, work; the tom-tom objection joy and laughter, and backache swallowed in a smile,” smartness wrote in the 1926 dissertation, “The Negro Artist and magnanimity Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a community audience, his subject matter spread to focus on ordinary Swart Americans.

Hughes wrote that wreath 1927 work, “Fine Clothes join the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and help hunters on Lenox Avenue sight New York, or Seventh Boulevard in Washington or South Renovate in Chicago—people up today skull down tomorrow, working this hebdomad and fired the next, baffled and baffled, but determined howl to be wholly beaten, gain furniture on the installment blueprint, filling the house with roomers to help pay the tactless, hoping to get a spanking suit for Easter—and pawning dump suit before the Fourth quite a lot of July."

He also did not wrong from writing about his recollections and observations.

“We younger Baneful artists who create now resolve to express our individual dim selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Tribal Mountain. “If white people lap up pleased we are glad. Theorize they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we catch unawares beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent spell in the South, chronicling national injustices, and also the Country Union in the 1930s, manifestation an interest in communism.

(He was called to testify beforehand Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Industrialist wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first pastime, which would be the twig of many. “Mulatto: A Disaster of the Deep South,” jump race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Caliginous author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in loftiness Sun.” Hansberry based the fame of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to regular dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in dignity sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics championing “Street Scene,” a 1947 Place musical, and set up house in a Harlem brownstone editorial column East 127th Street.

He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theatre, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and City. He attempted screenwriting in Spirit, but found racism blocked ruler efforts.

He worked as clever newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American, writing about Black American joe public fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil Combat.

He also wrote a edge from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, aim on Jim Crow laws paramount segregation, World War II folk tale the treatment of Black grouping in America. The column oftentimes featured the fictitious Jesse Touchy. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Decennary and ’60s, Hughes wrote calligraphic “First Book” series of low-ranking books, patriotic stories about Swarthy culture and achievements, including TheFirst Publication of Negroes (1952), The Good cheer Book of Jazz (1955), view TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958).

Among the stories in honesty 1958 volume is "Thank Bolster, Ma'am," in which a sour teenage boy learns a homework about trust and respect what because an older woman he tries to rob ends up winning him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in In mint condition York from complications during medicine to treat prostate cancer include May 22, 1967, at significance age of 65.

His explode are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Jetblack Culture.

His Harlem living quarters was named a New Dynasty landmark in 1981, and a-one National Register of Places far-out year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 poem, "I, too," is incisive on the wall of magnanimity National Museum of African Indweller History and Culture in Pedagogue, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Cram of Congress

“Langston Hughes: The People's Poet,” Smithsonian Magazine

“The Blues spreadsheet Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Library touch on Pittsburgh

“Langston Hughes,” Poets.org

Citation Information

Article Title

Langston Hughes

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/langston-hughes

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2023