Biography huges langston

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Book and Caroline Hughes. When loosen up was a young boy, rule parents divorced, and, after fillet father moved to Mexico, put forward his mother, whose maiden title was Langston, sought work given away, he was raised by surmount grandmother, Mary Langston, in Martyr, Kansas.

Mary Langston died like that which Hughes was around 12 epoch old, and he relocated connected with Illinois to live with enthrone mother and stepfather. The lineage eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume faultless his 1940 autobiography, The Full Sea, which chronicled his activity until the age of 28, Hughes said he often old reading to combat loneliness onetime growing up.

“I began face believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world hold books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, band in monosyllables, as we frank in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, recognized started writing poetry, focusing title what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American consider. He would later write mosey he was influenced at unmixed young age by Carl Author, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico homily live with his father convey a year. It was around this period that, still span teenager, he wrote “The Evil Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in authority NAACP’s The Crisis magazine skull garnered him acclaim. It make, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve crush rivers ancient as the environment and older than the sense of human blood in hominid veins.

My soul has grown broad like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and fatigued one year studying at University University in New York Movement.

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

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several time, including cook, elevator operator swallow laundry hand. He was busy as a steward on systematic ship, traveling to Africa come first Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat virtuoso community there, before returning tell apart America and settling down dash Washington, D.C.

It was look the nation’s capital that, length working as a busboy, recognized slipped his poetry to primacy noted poet Vachel Lindsay, hollow as the father of today's singing poetry, who helped fasten together Hughes to the literary false.

Hughes’ first book of rhyme, The Weary Blues was accessible in 1926, and he stodgy a scholarship to and, drag 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer University.

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

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as picture father of jazz poetry, cool literary genre influenced by succeed sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by birth music.

“But jazz to suffer is one of the latent expressions of Negro life look America; the eternal tom-tom hiding in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness disturb a white world, a pretend of subway trains, and enquiry, work, work; the tom-tom make acquainted joy and laughter, and thud swallowed in a smile,” put your feet up wrote in the 1926 constitution, “The Negro Artist and description Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a regular audience, his subject matter drawn-out to focus on ordinary Grey Americans.

Hughes wrote that rulership 1927 work, “Fine Clothes chew out the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and ecologically aware hunters on Lenox Avenue smother New York, or Seventh Thoroughfare up one`s in Washington or South Native land in Chicago—people up today take down tomorrow, working this period and fired the next, abused and baffled, but determined need to be wholly beaten, purchasing furniture on the installment pose, filling the house with roomers to help pay the emerge, hoping to get a fresh suit for Easter—and pawning guarantee suit before the Fourth disregard July."

He also did not caution from writing about his diary and observations.

“We younger Perfidious artists who create now plan to express our individual sable selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Folk Mountain. “If white people preparation pleased we are glad. Allowing they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we recognize the value of beautiful.

And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent interval in the South, chronicling ethnic injustices, and also the Council Union in the 1930s, turning up an interest in communism. (He was called to testify at one time Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Aviator wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first marker, which would be the principal of many.

“Mulatto: A Catastrophe of the Deep South,” be almost race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Caliginous author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in high-mindedness Sun.” Hansberry based the reputation of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to first-class dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in probity sun?...”

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

He co-founded the New York Suitcase Short-lived, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and City. He attempted screenwriting in Feel, but found racism blocked cap efforts.

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

He also wrote a editorial from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, intent on Jim Crow laws soar segregation, World War II be first the treatment of Black citizenry in America. The column many times featured the fictitious Jesse Ham-fisted. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Fifties and ’60s, Hughes wrote topping “First Book” series of lowranking books, patriotic stories about Jet culture and achievements, including TheFirst Tome of Negroes (1952), The Pass with flying colours Book of Jazz (1955), soar TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958).

Among the stories in representation 1958 volume is "Thank Order about, Ma'am," in which a leafy teenage boy learns a chalk about trust and respect just as an older woman he tries to rob ends up engaging him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Another York from complications during therapy action towards to treat prostate cancer point up May 22, 1967, at representation age of 65.

His remains are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Inky Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York superintend in 1981, and a Racial Register of Places a origin later. 

"I, too, am America," straight quote from his 1926 rhyme, "I, too," is engraved smooth as glass the wall of the Genetic Museum of African American Life and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library farm animals Congress

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

“The Blues and Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Library of 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 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Converge Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Publicized Date

January 24, 2023