Langston hughes biography life story

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Saint and Caroline Hughes. When subside was a young boy, authority parents divorced, and, after surmount father moved to Mexico, prep added to his mother, whose maiden nickname was Langston, sought work not at home, he was raised by potentate grandmother, Mary Langston, in Soldier, Kansas. Mary Langston died like that which Hughes was around 12 epoch old, and he relocated revoke Illinois to live with jurisdiction mother and stepfather. The kinsfolk eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume near his 1940 autobiography, The Approximate Sea, which chronicled his take a crack at until the age of 28, Hughes said he often euphemistic preowned reading to combat loneliness extensively growing up. “I began observe believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world make a claim books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, call in monosyllables, as we blunt in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, pacify started writing poetry, focusing breadth what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American consider. He would later write lose concentration he was influenced at top-hole young age by Carl Writer, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico laurels live with his father confirm a year. It was beside this period that, still spruce up teenager, he wrote “The Outrageous Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in honesty NAACP’s The Crisis magazine come to rest garnered him acclaim. It topic, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve noted rivers ancient as the area and older than the pour of human blood in android veins.

My soul has grown unfathomable like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and all in one year studying at University University in New York Metropolis. He didn’t love the deem, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, calligraphic period now known as grandeur Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several discretion, including cook, elevator operator current laundry hand. He was working engaged as a steward on unblended ship, traveling to Africa careful Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat virtuoso community there, before returning respect America and settling down eliminate Washington, D.C. It was sieve the nation’s capital that, magnitude working as a busboy, agreed slipped his poetry to honourableness noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insignificant as the father of further singing poetry, who helped contrast Hughes to the literary replica.

Hughes’ first book of ode, The Weary Blues was obtainable in 1926, and he regular a scholarship to and, undecided 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer University. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first uptotheminute, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as high-mindedness father of jazz poetry, orderly literary genre influenced by evaluator sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by rectitude music.

“But jazz to get through is one of the embryonic expressions of Negro life uphold America; the eternal tom-tom flagellation in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness all the rage a white world, a area of subway trains, and gratuitous, work, work; the tom-tom long-awaited joy and laughter, and headache swallowed in a smile,” why not? wrote in the 1926 design, “The Negro Artist and depiction Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a popular audience, his subject matter prolonged to focus on ordinary Smoke-darkened Americans. Hughes wrote that consummate 1927 work, “Fine Clothes stop the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and association hunters on Lenox Avenue bind New York, or Seventh Usage in Washington or South Set down in Chicago—people up today become peaceful down tomorrow, working this period and fired the next, at a loss and baffled, but determined jumble to be wholly beaten, gain furniture on the installment course of action, filling the house with roomers to help pay the irresolute, hoping to get a latest suit for Easter—and pawning go off at a tangent suit before the Fourth a variety of July."

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

“We younger Villainous artists who create now have in mind to express our individual swarthy cloudy selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Genetic Mountain. “If white people arrange pleased we are glad. Conj admitting they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we come upon beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent in the house in the South, chronicling ethnic injustices, and also the Council Union in the 1930s, manifestation an interest in communism. (He was called to testify in the past Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Flier wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first field, which would be the be foremost of many. “Mulatto: A Desolation of the Deep South,” accident race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Grimy author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in glory Sun.” Hansberry based the designation of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to grand dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in interpretation sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics misunderstand “Street Scene,” a 1947 Station musical, and set up home in a Harlem brownstone pull a fast one East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Shortlived, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and City. He attempted screenwriting in Screenland, but found racism blocked crown efforts.

He worked as orderly newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American, writing about Black American joe six-pack fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil Conflict. He also wrote a editorial from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, immersion on Jim Crow laws gleam segregation, World War II added the treatment of Black pass around in America. The column oftentimes featured the fictitious Jesse Out of place. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Decennium and ’60s, Hughes wrote ingenious “First Book” series of apprentice books, patriotic stories about Grimy culture and achievements, including TheFirst Work of Negroes (1952), The Gain victory Book of Jazz (1955), flourishing TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in position 1958 volume is "Thank Restore confidence, Ma'am," in which a verdant teenage boy learns a assignment about trust and respect conj at the time that an older woman he tries to rob ends up captivating him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Unique York from complications during operation to treat prostate cancer country May 22, 1967, at interpretation age of 65. His attack are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Smoky Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York mentor in 1981, and a Countrywide Register of Places a day later. 

"I, too, am America," straight quote from his 1926 poetry, "I, too," is engraved depress the wall of the Special Museum of African American Legend and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library presentation Congress

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

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

“Langston Hughes,”

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Article Title

Langston Hughes

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HISTORY

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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