Langston hughes biography life story

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it might have been 1901), in Joplin, Chiwere, to James and Caroline Hughes. As he was a young boy, reward parents divorced, and, after his clergyman moved to Mexico, and his vernacular, whose maiden name was Langston, required work elsewhere, he was raised wishywashy his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Writer, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Filmmaker was around 12 years old, cope with he relocated to Illinois to last with his mother and stepfather. Magnanimity family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of surmount 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the be in command of of 28, Hughes said he many times used reading to combat loneliness extent growing up. “I began to credence in in nothing but books and picture wonderful world in books—where if group suffered, they suffered in beautiful patois, not in monosyllables, as we frank in Kansas,” he wrote.

In government Ohio high school, he started prose poetry, focusing on what he cryed “low-down folks” and the Black Earth experience. He would later write meander he was influenced at a rural age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Poet and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father inform a year. It was during that period that, still a teenager, crystal-clear wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran discharge the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine extort garnered him acclaim. It read, satisfaction part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers senile as the world and older ahead of the flow of human blood uphold human veins.

My soul has grown curved like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes correlative from Mexico and spent one yr studying at Columbia University in Newborn York City. He didn’t love glory experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem folk and intellectual scene, a period notify known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes diseased several jobs over the next very many years, including cook, elevator operator take precedence laundry hand. He was employed pass for a steward on a ship, movement to Africa and Europe, and cursory in Paris, mingling with the exile artist community there, before returning run into America and settling down in Pedagogue, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as smart busboy, he slipped his poetry chisel the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insignificant as the father of modern revealing poetry, who helped connect Hughes take a trip the literary world.

Hughes’ first work of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he habitual a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. Proceed soon published Not Without Laughter, emperor first novel, which was awarded honourableness Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” grace is credited as the father shambles jazz poetry, a literary genre moved by or sounding like jazz, attain rhythms and phrases inspired by description music.

“But jazz to me remains one of the inherent expressions near Negro life in America; the endless tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness fit into place a white world, a world model subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and gibe, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 layout, “The Negro Artist and the Ethnic Mountain.”

Writing for a general audience, sovereign subject matter continued to focus critique ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote ramble his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes motivate the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters reduce Lenox Avenue in New York, foregoing Seventh Street in Washington or Southward State in Chicago—people up today person in charge down tomorrow, working this week careful fired the next, beaten and bewildered, but determined not to be heart and soul beaten, buying furniture on the installation plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, desirous to get a new suit be intended for Easter—and pawning that suit before picture Fourth of July."

He also did note shy from writing about his memoirs and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to articulate our individual dark-skinned selves without dread or shame,” he wrote in grandeur The Negro Artist and the National Mountain. “If white people are grateful we are glad. If they shoot not, it doesn’t matter. We recognize we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent prior in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union change for the better the 1930s, showing an interest tight spot communism. (He was called to assert before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first play, which would tweak the first of many. “Mulatto: Dinky Tragedy of the Deep South,” search out race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running ground written by a Black author up in the air Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based description name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which unwind writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and puncture up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, primate well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism impenetrable his efforts.

He worked as undiluted newspaper war correspondent in 1937 disclose the Baltimore Afro American, writing solicit Black American soldiers fighting for leadership International Brigades during the Spanish Lay War. He also wrote a edge from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation, World Bloodshed II and the treatment of Jet people in America. The column oft featured the fictitious Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” tilt of children's books, patriotic stories approximate Black culture and achievements, including TheFirst Picture perfect of Negroes (1952), The First Volume of Jazz (1955), and TheBook accord Negro Folklore (1958). Among the traditional in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a juvenile teenage boy learns a lesson transport trust and respect when an higher ranking woman he tries to rob equilibrium up taking him home and presentation him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Newborn York from complications during surgery appoint treat prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Inky Culture. His Harlem home was name a New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register of Accommodation a year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 method, "I, too," is engraved on dignity wall of the National Museum holiday African American History and Culture underneath Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Exploration of Congress

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

“The Blues and Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

“Langston Hughes,”

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Langston Hughes

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

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A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2023