biography of langston hughes for students

Biography of Langston Hughes, Poet, Key Figure in Harlem Renaissance

Hughes wrote about the African-American experience

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Langston Hughes was a singular voice in American poetry, writing with vivid imagery and jazz-influenced rhythms about the everyday Black experience in the United States. While best-known for his modern, free-form poetry with superficial simplicity masking deeper symbolism, Hughes worked in fiction, drama, and film as well.

Hughes purposefully mixed his own personal experiences into his work, setting him apart from other major Black poets of the era, and placing him at the forefront of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance . From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, this explosion of poetry and other work by Black Americans profoundly changed the artistic landscape of the country and continues to influence writers to this day.

Fast Facts: Langston Hughes

• Full Name: James Mercer Langston Hughes
• Known For: Poet, novelist, journalist, activist
• Born: February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri
• Parents: James and Caroline Hughes (née Langston)
• Died: May 22, 1967 in New York, New York
• Education: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania
• Selected Works: The Weary Blues, The Ways of White Folks, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Montage of a Dream Deferred
•  Notable Quote: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Early Years

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father divorced his mother shortly thereafter and left them to travel. As a result of the split, he was primarily raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, who had a strong influence on Hughes, educating him in the oral traditions of his people and impressing upon him a sense of pride; she was referred to often in his poems. After Mary Langston died, Hughes moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her new husband. He began writing poetry shortly after enrolling in high school.

Hughes moved to Mexico in 1919 to live with his father for a short time. In 1920, Hughes graduated high school and returned to Mexico. He wished to attend Columbia University in New York and lobbied his father for financial assistance; his father did not think writing was a good career, and offered to pay for college only if Hughes studied engineering. Hughes attended Columbia University in 1921 and did well, but found the racism he encountered there to be corrosive—though the surrounding Harlem neighborhood was inspiring to him. His affection for Harlem remained strong for the rest of his life. He left Columbia after one year, worked a series of odd jobs, and traveled to Africa working as a crewman on a boat, and from there on to Paris. There he became part of the Black expatriate community of artists.

The Crisis to Fine Clothes to the Jew (1921-1930)

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)
• The Weary Blues (1926)
• The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
• Not Without Laughter (1930)

Hughes wrote his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers while still in high school, and published it in The Crisis , the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The poem gained Hughes a great deal of attention; influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, it is a tribute to Black people throughout history in a free verse format:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes began to publish poems on a regular basis, and in 1925 won the Poetry Prize from Opportunity Magazine . Fellow writer Carl Van Vechten, who Hughes had met on his overseas travels, sent Hughes’ work to Alfred A. Knopf, who enthusiastically published Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926.

Around the same time, Hughes took advantage of his job as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel to give several poems to poet Vachel Lindsay, who began to champion Hughes in the mainstream media of the time, claiming to have discovered him. Based on these literary successes, Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and published The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in The Nation . The piece was a manifesto calling for more Black artists to produce Black-centric art without worrying whether white audiences would appreciate it—or approve of it.

In 1927, Hughes published his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. In 1930, Hughes published Not Without Laughter , which is sometimes described as a "prose poem" and sometimes as a novel, signaling his continued evolution and his impending experiments outside of poetry.

By this point, Hughes was firmly established as a leading light in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. The literary movement celebrated Black art and culture as public interest in the subject soared.

Fiction, Film, and Theater Work (1931-1949)

• The Ways of White Folks (1934)
• Mulatto (1935)
• Way Down South (1935)
• The Big Sea (1940)

Hughes traveled through the American South in 1931 and his work became more forcefully political, as he became increasingly aware of the racial injustices of the time. Always sympathetic to communist political theory, seeing it as an alternative to the implicit racism of capitalism, he also traveled extensively through the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

He published his first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks , in 1934. The story cycle is marked by a certain pessimism in regards to race relations; Hughes seems to suggest in these stories that there will never be a time without racism in this country. His play Mulatto , first staged in 1935, deals with many of the same themes as the most famous story in the collection, Cora Unashamed , which tells the story of a Black servant who develops a close emotional bond with the young white daughter of her employers.

Hughes became increasingly interested in the theater, and founded the New York Suitcase Theater with Paul Peters in 1931. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, he also co-founded a theater troupe in Los Angeles while co-writing the screenplay for the film Way Down South . Hughes imagined he would be an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood; his failure to gain much success in the industry was put down to racism. He wrote and published his autobiography The Big Sea in 1940 despite being only 28 years old; the chapter titled Black Renaissance discussed the literary movement in Harlem and inspired the name "Harlem Renaissance."

Continuing his interest in theater, Hughes founded the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941 and began writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender , which he would continue to write for two decades. After World War II and the Civil Rights Movement ’s rise and successes, Hughes found that the younger generation of Black artists, coming into a world where segregation was ending and real progress seemed possible in terms of race relations and the Black experience, saw him as a relic of the past. His style of writing and Black-centric subject matter seemed passé .

Children’s Books and Later Work (1950-1967)

• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
• The First Book of the Negroes (1952)
• I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956)
• The Book of Negro Folklore (1958)

Hughes attempted to interact with the new generation of Black artists by directly addressing them, but rejecting what he saw as their vulgarity and over-intellectual approach. His epic poem "suite," Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) took inspiration from jazz music, collecting a series of related poems sharing the overarching theme of a "dream deferred" into something akin to a film montage—a series of images and short poems following quickly after each other in order to position references and symbolism together. The most famous section from the larger poem is the most direct and powerful statement of the theme, known as Harlem :

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode ?

In 1956, Hughes published his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander . He took a greater interest in documenting the cultural history of Black America, producing A Pictorial History of the Negro in America in 1956, and editing The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958.

Hughes continued to work throughout the 1960s and was considered by many to be the leading writer of Black America at the time, although none of his works after Montage of a Dream Deferred approached the power and clarity of his work during his prime.

Although Hughes had previously published a book for children in 1932 ( Popo and Fifina ), in the 1950s he began publishing books specifically for children regularly, including his First Book series, which was designed to instill a sense of pride in and respect for the cultural achievements of African Americans in its youth. The series included The First Book of the Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1954), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1964).

The tone of these children’s books was perceived as very patriotic as well as focused on the appreciation of Black culture and history. Many people, aware of Hughes’ flirtations with communism and his run-in with Senator McCarthy , suspected he attempted to make his children’s books self-consciously patriotic in order to combat any perception that he might not be a loyal citizen.

Personal Life

While Hughes reportedly had several affairs with women during his life, he never married or had children. Theories concerning his sexual orientation abound; many believe that Hughes, known for strong affections for Black men in his life, seeded clues about his homosexuality throughout his poems (something Walt Whitman, one of his key influences, was known to do in his own work). However, there is no overt evidence to support this, and some argue that Hughes was, if anything, asexual and uninterested in sex.

Despite his early and long-term interest in socialism and his visit to the Soviet Union, Hughes denied being a communist when called to testify by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He then distanced himself from communism and socialism, and was thus estranged from the political left that had often supported him. His work dealt less and less with political considerations after the mid-1950s as a result, and when he compiled the poems for his 1959 collection Selected Poems, he excluded most of his more politically-focused work from his youth.

Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and entered the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on May 22, 1967 to undergo surgery to treat the disease. Complications arose during the procedure, and Hughes passed away at the age of 65. He was cremated, and his ashes interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where the floor bears a design based on his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers , including a line from the poem inscribed on the floor.

Hughes turned his poetry outward at a time in the early 20th century when Black artists were increasingly turning inward, writing for an insular audience. Hughes wrote about Black history and the Black experience, but he wrote for a general audience, seeking to convey his ideas in emotional, easily-understood motifs and phrases that nevertheless had power and subtlety behind them.

Hughes incorporated the rhythms of modern speech in Black neighborhoods and of jazz and blues music, and he included characters of "low" morals in his poems, including alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes, whereas most Black literature sought to disavow such characters because of a fear of proving some of the worst racist assumptions. Hughes felt strongly that showing all aspects of Black culture was part of reflecting life and refused to apologize for what he called the "indelicate" nature of his writing.

• Als, Hilton. “The Elusive Langston Hughes.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner.
• Ward, David C. “Why Langston Hughes Still Reigns as a Poet for the Unchampioned.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 22 May 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-langston-hughes-still-reigns-poet-unchampioned-180963405/.
• Johnson, Marisa, et al. “Women in the Life of Langston Hughes.” US History Scene, http://ushistoryscene.com/article/women-and-hughes/.
• McKinney, Kelsey. “Langston Hughes Wrote a Children's Book in 1955.” Vox, Vox, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/4/2/8335251/langston-hughes-jazz-book.
• Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.
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Langston Hughes facts for kids

Langston Hughes (1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet , novelist , playwright and short story writer. Hughes was one of the writers and artists whose work was called the Harlem Renaissance .

Hughes grew up as a poor boy from Missouri , the descendant of African people who had been taken to America as slaves . At that time, the term used for African-Americans was " negro " which means a person with black skin. Most "negroes" did not remember or think about their link with the people of Africa , even though it was a big influence on their culture and, in particular, their music . Hughes was unusual for his time, because he went back to West Africa to understand more about his own culture. Through his poetry, plays, and stories, Hughes helped other black Americans to see themselves as part of a much bigger group of people, so that now the term "African-American" is used with pride.

Hughes became a famous writer, but all his life he remembered how he started out, and he helped and encouraged many other struggling writers.

Hughes' father and Columbia University

Non-fiction, major plays, related pages, images for kids.

Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri . His parents were James Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes who was a teacher. Langston's father, James Hughes, was so upset about the racism towards African-Americans that he left his family and moved to Mexico . During his childhood , Hughes was cared for by his grandmother, in Lawrence, Kansas while his mother worked to support the family. Langston's grandmother was a great story teller. She told stories that made him feel proud to be an African-American.

After his grandmother died, Hughes and his mother moved about 12 times until settling in Cleveland, and then, as a teenager went to live in Lincoln, Illinois with his mother, who had remarried. He was often left alone because his mother was at work. Even though his childhood was difficult and had lots of changes, he was able to use these things in the poetry that he started to write while he was at school. He never forgot the stories of his grandmother and tried to help other African-Americans when they were having problems. These were the people that he later wrote about in his own stories.

When Hughes went to school in Lincoln, there were only two African-American children in the class. The teacher talked to them about poetry. She said that what a poem needed most was rhythm . Langston later said that he had rhythm in his blood because, "as everyone knows", all African-Americans have rhythm. The children made him the "class poet".

At high school in Cleveland, Ohio , Langston learned to love reading. He loved the poetry of the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg . He wrote articles for the school newspaper, he edited the school yearbook and he wrote his first short stories and plays.

When Langston Hughes was 17, he went to spend some time with his father in Mexico. He was very unhappy there. Hughes could not understand how his father felt. He said: "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much!" Hughes later wrote this poem:

When he was finished at high school in Lincoln in 1920, he went back to Mexico, to ask his father to pay for him to go to university . Hughes' father was a lawyer and a wealthy landowner. He could afford to send his son to university but he made difficulties about it. He said that Hughes could only go to university if he went overseas and studied engineering . Hughes wanted to go to a university in the US. After a time, they made an agreement that he should go to Columbia University but study engineering, not an arts degree. He went to Columbia in 1921 but left in 1922, partly because of the racism in the university.

Until 1926 Hughes did many different types of work. In 1923 he went as a crewman on the ship "S.S.Malone" and went to West Africa and Europe . He left the ship and stayed for a short time in Paris where he joined several other African-Americans who were living there. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U.S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. . In 1925 he got a job as an assistant to Carter G. Woodson who worked with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History . Hughes did not enjoy his work because he did not have enough time to write, so he left and got a job as a "busboy", wiping tables and washing dishes at a hotel. Hughes is sometimes called "The Busboy Poet". Meanwhile, some of his poems were published in magazines and were being collected together for his first book of poetry. While he was working at the hotel he met the poet Vachel Lindsay , who helped to make Hughes known as a new African-American poet.

In 1926 Hughes began studying at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania . He had help from patrons , Amy Spingarn, who gave him $300 and "Godmother" Charlotte Osgood Mason. Hughes graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929 and became a Doctor of Letters in 1943. He was also given an honorary doctorate by Howard University . For the rest of his life, except when he travelled to the Caribbean or West Indies , Hughes lived in Harlem , New York .

Langston Hughes sometimes went out with women, but he never married. People who have studied his life and poetry are sure that he was homosexual. In the 1930s it was harder to be open about being gay than it is nowadays. His poetry has lots of symbols which are used by other homosexual writers. Hughes thought that men who had very dark skin were particularly beautiful. It seems from his poetry that he was in love with an African-American man. He also wrote a story which might tell of his own experience. Blessed Assurance is the story of a father's anger because his son is "queer" and acts like a girl.

Hughes' life and work were an important part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those Zora Neale Hurston , Wallace Thurman , Countee Cullen , Richard Bruce Nugent , and Aaron Douglas , who together started a magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists . Hughes and these friends did not always agree with the ideas of some of the other African-American writers who were also part of the Harlem Renaissance because they thought their ideas were Middle class and that they treated others who had darker skin, less education and less money with discrimination . All his life, Hughes never forgot the lessons that he learned about poor and uneducated African-Americans in the stories that his grandmother told.

In 1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the "Spingarn Medal" for "distinguished achievements by an African American". Hughes became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. In 1973, an award was named after him, the "Langston Hughes Medal", awarded by the City College of New York.

Hughes became a famous American poet, but he was always ready to help other people, particularly young black writers. He was worried that many young writers hated themselves, and expressed these feelings to the world. He tried to help people feel pride, and not worry about the prejudice of other people. He also tried to help young African-Americans not to express hatred and prejudice towards white Americans. Hughes wrote:

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65 after having surgery for prostate cancer. His ashes are buried under the floor of the Langston Hughes Auditorium in the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Over his ashes is a circle with a beautiful African design called "Rivers." At the centre of the design are words from a poem by Hughes: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

• The Weary Blues . Knopf, 1926
• Fine Clothes to the Jew . Knopf, 1927
• The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations , 1931
• Dear Lovely Death , 1931
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems . Knopf, 1932
• Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play . N.Y.: Golden Stair Press, 1932
• Shakespeare in Harlem . Knopf, 1942
• Freedom's Plow . 1943
• Fields of Wonder . Knopf,1947
• One-Way Ticket . 1949
• Montage of a Dream Deferred . Holt, 1951
• Selected Poems of Langston Hughes . 1958
• Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz . Hill & Wang, 1961
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times , 1967
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes . Knopf, 1994
• Let America Be America Again 2005
• Not Without Laughter . Knopf, 1930
• The Ways of White Folks . Knopf, 1934
• Simple Speaks His Mind . 1950
• Laughing to Keep from Crying , Holt, 1952
• Simple Takes a Wife . 1953
• Sweet Flypaper of Life , photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955
• Simple Stakes a Claim . 1957
• Tambourines to Glory (book), 1958
• The Best of Simple . 1961
• Simple's Uncle Sam . 1965
• Something in Common and Other Stories . Hill & Wang, 1963
• Short Stories of Langston Hughes . Hill & Wang, 1996
• The Big Sea . New York: Knopf, 1940
• Famous American Negroes . 1954
• Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer . 1954
• I Wonder as I Wander . New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America , with Milton Meltzer. 1956
• Famous Negro Heroes of America . 1958
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP . 1962
• Mule Bone , with Zora Neale Hurston. 1931
• Mulatto . 1935 (renamed The Barrier, an opera , in 1950)
• Troubled Island , with William Grant Still. 1936
• Little Ham . 1936
• Emperor of Haiti . 1936
• Don't You Want to be Free? 1938
• Street Scene (opera)|Street Scene , contributed lyrics. 1947
• Tambourines to glory . 1956
• Simply Heavenly . 1957
• Black Nativity . 1961
• Five Plays by Langston Hughes . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
• Jericho-Jim Crow . 1964
• Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps . 1932
• The First Book of the Negroes . 1952
• The First Book of Jazz . 1954
• The First Book of Rhythms . 1954
• The First Book of the West Indies . 1956
• First Book of Africa . 1964
• Harlem Renaissance

Hughes in 1902

Hughes at Lincoln University in 1928

Hughes's ashes are interred under a cosmogram medallion in the foyer of the Arthur Schomburg Center in Harlem

The Ways of White Folks , Hughes' first short story collection

Langston Hughes, 1943. Photo by Gordon Parks

The poem "Danse Africaine" as wall poem on a wall of the building at the Nieuwe Rijn  [nl] 46, Leiden ( Netherlands )

• This page was last modified on 27 October 2023, at 13:17. Suggest an edit .

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Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten . Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes’s debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar , Carl Sandburg , and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay , Jean Toomer , and Countee Cullen , Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.

The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes

differed from most of his predecessors among black poets… in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965);  Simple Stakes a Claim  (Rinehart, 1957);  Simple Takes a Wife  (Simon & Schuster, 1953);  Simple Speaks His Mind  (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949  (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps , edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

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Langston Hughes

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: January 24, 2023

Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance  as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working class, earning him renown as one of America’s most notable poets.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901 ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea , which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP ’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City . He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world.

Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. He soon published Not Without Laughter , his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

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

“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain .”

Writing for a general audience, his subject matter continued to focus on ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote that his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

He also did not shy from writing about his experiences and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain . “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union in the 1930s, showing an interest in communism . (He was called to testify before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston , his first play, which would be the first of many. “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “ Harlem ” in which he 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 set up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism blocked his efforts.

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

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, patriotic stories about Black culture and achievements, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust and respect when an older woman he tries to rob ends up taking him home and giving him a meal.

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

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

“ Langston Hughes ,” The Library of Congress

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

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

“ Langston Hughes ,” Poets.org

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7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes

Here are seven facts about the influential poet, novelist and playwright who captured the African American experience.

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His earliest inspiration came from his grandmother

With his father in another country and his mother also absent for long stretches of his childhood, Hughes drew his earliest inspiration from his grandmother. The first Black woman to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, and the widow of one of John Brown ’s abolitionist partners, Mary Langston relayed her gift for storytelling through tales of slavery, heroism, and family heritage. Young Hughes also took note of how she rented out her own living space to earn money and devoted her meager funds to making sure he was properly clothed and fed. One of his earliest published poems, “Aunt Sue’s Stories,” is believed to be a tribute to the proud woman who shaped his early life.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was his ticket to college

While on a train to Mexico to visit his father, who had the money to pay his college tuition, Hughes was seized by inspiration to write what would become his earliest acclaimed poem. As the train reached St. Louis at sunset, the dramatic light reflecting off the muddy banks of the Mississippi River, Hughes quickly scribbled out the brief but powerful “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

His father initially sneered at the idea that a Black man could attend college to become a writer, but the poem’s publication in W.E.B. Dubois’ Crisis magazine in June 1921, followed by a reprint in Literary Digest , helped convince the elder Hughes that his son had a talent worth pursuing.

He was first asked to write his memoir at age 23

The big sea by langston hughes.

Hughes published his first memoir, The Big Sea , when he was only 38 years old, but he was first asked to write it even earlier. At 23, he was set for the release of his first acclaimed volume of poetry, The Weary Blues , when he submitted an autobiographical essay titled “L’histoire de ma vie” to his mentor Carl Van Vechten to use for the book’s introduction. Both Van Vechten and the publisher, Blanche Knopf, were blown away by the essay, and encouraged its author to develop it into a full-length book.

However, Hughes wasn’t ready for the undertaking. “I hate to think backwards,” he noted. “It isn’t amusing... I am still too much enmeshed in the affects of my young life to write clearly about it.”

He traveled the world

Although Hughes is closely identified with the Harlem Renaissance and lived in that New York City neighborhood for many years, his life was marked by near-constant traveling. As a child, he lived in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio before joining his dad in Mexico. In his early 20s, he worked as a deckhand aboard ships that took him to Africa and Holland, leading to further jaunts to France and Italy.

Hughes visited Haiti and Cuba in 1932, and after traveling to the Soviet Union as part of an ill-fated film project, he wound through Central Asia and the Far East before heading home. Hughes later spent significant time in Spain, covering the civil war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American . Fittingly, he titled his second autobiography I Wonder as I Wander .

Jesse B. Semple was inspired by a bar patron

One night at Patsy’s Bar in Harlem in 1942, Hughes was amused by a conversation with another patron, who was complaining about his job making cranks at a war plant in New Jersey. Thus was born Hughes’ famed Jesse B. Semple, a.k.a. “Simple,” the African American everyman who mused on issues of race, politics, and relationships.

Simple first appeared in print on February 13, 1943, in Hughes’ column “From Here to Yonder” for the Chicago Defender , and became a column fixture for the next 23 years. He also was the subject of five books, as well as a play, Simply Heavenly , that made it to Broadway in 1957.

He was called to testify before the Senate about his support for Joseph McCarthy

Hughes wasn’t shy about his support for far-left radical politics during the 1930s, a record that eventually drew the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy ’s anti-Communist campaign. Called to testify before the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations in 1953, Hughes prepared a five-page written statement and arranged a deal in which his most inflammatory poetry was not read aloud. He was still forced to account for these poems, including “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” and to delicately explain how he was never an official member of the Communist Party.

Although Hughes deftly handled himself during the hearings and emerged in clear standing, he was rattled by the experience. When his Selected Poems was published in 1959, it was notably missing the politically charged works that had landed him in hot water.

He never stopped writing

Hughes’ total output of material, written from 1920 until his death in 1967, was nothing short of prolific. Along with his two autobiographies, he published 16 volumes of poetry, three short story collections, two novels, and nine children’s books. He also wrote at least 20 plays, as well as numerous scripts for radio, television and film, and translated the works of such writers as Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and Federico García Lorca . All that doesn’t even account for his regular correspondence with friends, fans, and publishers, a collection so voluminous it was enough to fill out almost 500 pages of the 2015 compilation, Selected Letters of Langston Hughes .

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Biography: langston hughes.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that “the negro was in vogue”, which was later paraphrased as “when Harlem was in vogue.”

First published in The Crisis in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which became Hughes’s signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes’s first and last published poems appeared in The Crisis ; more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal. Hughes’s life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas.

Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance: W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality.

Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the “low-life” in their art: that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized the divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community.   Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in  The Nation in 1926:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,”   Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself–a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

View Upton Sinclair’s full biography on Wikipedia.

• Langston Hughes. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of Langston Hughes. Authored by : Carl van Vechten. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Langston_Hughes_by_Carl_Van_Vechten_1936.jpg . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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Langston Hughes

Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, essayist, and translator, James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902, to parents Caroline (Carrie) Mercer Langston, a school teacher, and James Nathaniel Hughes, an attorney. His parents separated before Langston was born and he spent his pre-adolescent years with his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas.  Mary Langston was the second wife of Charles Henry Langston, a major black political activist in Kansas, and the sister-in-law of former U.S. Congressman John Mercer Langston. After his grandmother’s death, Caroline married Homer Clark, a steel mill worker in Lincoln, Illinois. The couple settled in Cleveland, Ohio with Langston and his younger brother, Gwyn.

Hughes was fiercely independent from an early age. When his mother and brother followed his stepfather who occasionally left the family in search of higher wages, Langston stayed in Cleveland to finish high school. He also had a volatile relationship with his attorney father who pursued work in Cuba and who by 1920 was general manager of an American company in Mexico. Langston Hughes joined his father in Mexico City briefly in 1919, moved back to Cleveland to complete high school, and then upon receiving his diploma in 1920, returned to Mexico City.

Rather than acquiesce to his domineering father’s demands that he pursue a degree in mining engineering, Langston moved to New York City, New York and enrolled in Columbia University. Hughes quit Columbia after a year and decided to acquire a more worldly education. In 1922, he began a two-year stint as a ship’s crewman, during which he traveled to, and spent considerable time in, western Africa, France, and Italy. He also briefly lived in the expatriate community in London, England before returning to the United States in November 1924 to live with his mother in Washington, D.C.  In 1925, he became the personal assistant of historian Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

In 1926, Hughes he enrolled in Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and earned a liberal arts degree in 1930. His classmates included Thurgood Marshall, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice. While there, he joined Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

While in college, Hughes often returned to Harlem where he became a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes deeply believed that black art should represent the experiences and culture of the black “folk.” Images of rural and urban working-class African Americans filled his poetry and prose, and his writing celebrated blues and jazz culture. Some of his more famous works associated with the Harlem Renaissance include the collections of poems, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927); the novel Not Without Laughter (1930); and the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926).

Hughes was also politically engaged. During the 1930s, he wrote plays highlighting the injustice of the Scottsboro case and the imprisonment of the black Communist organizer, Angelo Herndon. In 1932, he was among a group of prominent black intellectuals who traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in an ultimately aborted film about black workers in the U.S. After realizing the film would not be made, Hughes decided to use the opportunity to travel across the Soviet Union to learn more about the world’s first Communist nation. During his travels, he spend a brief period in Turkmenistan (then part of the Soviet Union but now an independent nation) before traveling on to China and Japan. Between 1934 and 1935, Hughes lived in California, where he completed one novel and co-wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film, Way Down South.

In 1937, Hughes spent several months in Spain during its civil war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and a supporter of the anti-fascist forces. Even though Hughes began to distance himself from the left after World War II, he was enveloped by the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War era and testified before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Un-American Activities in 1953.

Hughes wrote sixteen books of poetry, twelve novels and short stories, and eight children’s books.  His honors and awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1934), Rosenwald Fellowship (1941), the Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award (1954), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Spingarn Award (1960).

By the early 1940s, Hughes ceased his peripatetic lifestyle and settled permanently in Harlem. However, he continued to write and interact with fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, such as Arna Bontemps, as well as younger writers he sought to encourage like Alice Walker.  Langston Hughes died in Harlem on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65.  James Mercer Langston Hughes’ ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Source: BlackPast

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5.7: Biography: Langston Hughes

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James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that “the negro was in vogue”, which was later paraphrased as “when Harlem was in vogue.”

First published in The Crisis in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which became Hughes’s signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes’s first and last published poems appeared in The Crisis ; more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal. Hughes’s life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas.

Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance: W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality.

Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the “low-life” in their art: that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized the divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community.   Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in  The Nation in 1926:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,”   Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself–a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

View Upton Sinclair’s full biography on Wikipedia.

• Langston Hughes. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of Langston Hughes. Authored by : Carl van Vechten. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Langston_Hughes_by_Carl_Van_Vechten_1936.jpg . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American novelist, poet, playwright, social activist, and columnist. He made his career in New York City, where he shifted when he was quite young. Langston Hughes was one of the innovators of the new genre poetry known as jazz poetry. He is also known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote about the period when Negro was in trend, and this period was rephrased as when Harlem was in trend.

Hughes became a creative writer from a very early age, growing up in different Midwestern towns. Hughes attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and after graduation attended Columbia University, New York City. He was dropped out of the university; still, he got a notice from the publishers in New York City. He was immediately recognized in the creative community in Harlem because of his writing, particularly poems. Besides poetry, Hughes also wrote short stories and plays. He also published some nonfiction works. He immensely wrote about the civil rights movement (from 1942 to 1962) in a weekly column. 

A Short Biography of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (James Mercer Langston Hughes) was born on 1 st February 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. When he was a young child, his parents got separated, and his father shifted to Mexico. Until the age of thirteen, he was raised by his grandmother. Afterward, Hughes went to Lincoln and started living with his mother and his foster father. The family then settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Hughes started writing poetry in Lincoln. He spent a year in Mexico after passing out from the college that was followed by a year at the University of Columbia in New York City. 

He also had some meek jobs during this time like launder, assistant cook, and busboy. Working as a seaman, he also traveled to Europe and Africa. He shifted to Washington, D.C., in November 1924. In 1926, Hughes published his first book of poetry The Weary Blue in the Alfred A. Knopf publishers. He graduated from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, in three years. His first novel, Not Without Laughter , received the Harmon gold medal for literature in 1930.

The primary influencers of Hughes included Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Hughes is regarded for his own insight and the colorful portrayal of the black life in America 1920s to 1960s. Hughes wrote short stories, poetry, novels, and plays; he was greatly engaged with the world of jazz and is also known as the earliest inventor of jazz poetry. He wrote a book-length poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951, influenced by jazz.

The artistic revolution of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s is greatly shaped by both life and works of Langston Hughes. Hughes did not differentiate between the common experience of black America and the personal experience of Black America, unlike other prominent black poets of the twentieth century – Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He narrated the stories of people and reflected the real and actual culture of his time. He also talked about their suffering and problems, as well as their love of laughter, language, and music.

Besides a large body of poetic work, Hughes also wrote plays (eleven in number), and other countless prose work that includes a celebrated “simple: books such as Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple’s Uncle Sam.

He also edited the collection The Book of Negro Folklore and The Poetry of the Negro . He also wrote a much-admired autobiography, The Big Sea , and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston in 1991.

On 22 nd May 1967, Langston Hughes died of difficulties from prostate cancer, in New York City. 

Langston Hughes’ Writing Style

In the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays published in 1973, Donald B. Gibson says from the black poets that among predecessors, Hughes is different from most of them in the sense that he wrote and addresses his poetry for people, particularly for black people. He says that the twentieth-century poets and writers turned to write about inward, obscure, and esoteric poetry for particular readers. Whereas, Hughes turned to write outward poetry, employing the theme, language, ideas, and attitude recognizable by all types of readers, even to the people who can simply read. He spread his message through poetry by employing humor in the apparently serious subject to them all across the country. His poetry has been read by more people than any other American poet.

The Essential Characteristics of Langston Hughes’ Literary Work

The following are the essential characteristics of Hughes’ work. Since he has written a larger body of poetry than prose work, the characteristics are mainly based on his poetic works.  

 The Use of Simple and Familiar Language

The main goal of Hughes was to spread his literary work, and particularly his poetic work, to the people belonging to any race. The black people are usually the mouthpiece of his works. Therefore, Hughes employed simple and unsophisticated language in his work. In addition to this, he uses free, unconventional, and decoded verse form in poetry. For example, the poem “I, Too, Sing America” is the best example in which the speaker expresses his dream.

“I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong .” (Lines 1 to 7)

The simple language in the poem is both rhetorical and poetic. The language is poetic because it runs into the main characteristic of poetic discourse: the language is coherent, connoted, condensed, and implicit. Similarly, the language is rhetorical because it has eleven (in the overall poem) rhetorical devices such as refrain, repetition, humor, irony, metaphor, kenning, foregrounding, image, symbol, ellipses, and hyperbole.

In his novels and short stories, Langston Hughes employs popular dialect or familiar language. For example, in the novel, Not without Laughing , Hughes employed a popular dialect with almost no ambiguities. Similarly, in poetry, Hughes also uses popular dialect. For example, in the poem “The Weary Blues”:

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more—

………………………………………………

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

The Use of the Politically Essential Language

The literary works of Langston Hughes appear to be concerned in order to overcome and fight the factual and institutional slavery. In the Afro-American Movement of Harlem, Langston Hughes is among the frontline activists. Along with other black poets of America, he is also influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The participation and the general obligation, to produce a literary and artistic expression, in connection to the existing identity of black people, in general, and of Afro-American, in particular, unite the social activists of the Harlem Renaissance.

In his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (published in 1921), Hughes clearly shows the experience and miseries of black slaves transported through the oceans and rivers. Basically, the poem is a nostalgia for the rivers that have developed the soul of the speaker and echoes the endurance, perseverance, life, death, victory, and wisdom. Inside the poet, a fire burns that nourishes his deep urge to write poetry and take from it a function of emancipation, justice, equity, and elevation. By using these political themes in his poetry, Langston Hughes became one of the greatest poets of all time. Hughes, like the Euphrates in the poem, bathed “when the dawn was young.”

Langston Hughes desires America to be the land of equality and freedom for all, blacks and whites. His poem, “Let America be America again,” published in 1936, advocates the liberation of American slaves.

“Let America be the dream the Dreamers dreamed

Let it be that great strong land of love

 Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

 That any man be crushed by one above.”

The Use of the Radical and Protest Tone

The tone of Langston Hughes is radical and revolutionary, along with protesting. Hughes appears to be outrageous and shocked because of the everlasting division between the different sects of people that has been entered insidiously into Harlem and North America. The physical and financial conditions of the black working class had not been improved since ages. The killings and executions in the south of America were countless, regardless of the involvement of Blacks in the Allied armies of the Great War.

In his literary works, Hughes rebels against this particular dark side of America. In his poetry and other works, he does not appear to believe in Christianity. He also revolts against the people who use religion, particularly the principles of Christianity, as a shield to hide their oppressive actions. These ideas inspire him to write the poem “Goodbye Christ.”

Langston Hughes revolts against this generally dark state of American life. He does “t trust the Christian religion. It is a revolt against the people who use Christianity as a mantle under which are hidden their oppressive actions, which inspired him to write his poem “Goodbye Christ.” In the poem, he writes,

“Listen, Christ,

You did alright in your day, I reckon —

But that day’s gone now.

They ghosted you up a swell story, too,

Called it Bible —

But it’s dead now,

The popes and the preachers’ve

Made too much money from it.”

Indeed, Hughes is not against Christ, nor he denounces his faith in Christ. However, he denounces the authority of white people over the religion, Bible, and church who use religion to exclude blacks.

Hughes got highly inspired from the 1932 trip to the Soviet Union, where every citizen – Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Europeans – was treated equally; even the blacks were treated more equally. It is because of this reason that Hughes wrote such revolutionary poems like “Good Morning Revolution” and Goodbye Christ.”

Due to such revolutionary poems and poems written in favor of Russian, Langston Hughes was accused of being a communist. However, he denies the allegation put on him before the American Senate and says that Communism only inspires him to criticize the enslavement, injustice, and insecurity encountered by the Afro-American for ages. According to Hughes, the only power able to liberate the Negros is of God; he has a firm belief in God. He believes that God acts according to his own will. In the poem “Who but Lord,” Hughes expresses his belief and hope in God.

“I said, O, Lord, if you can,

Save me from that man!

Don’t let him make a pulp out of me!

But the Lord he was not quick.

The Law raised up his stick

And beat the living hell

Out of me!”

Various Themes in Langston Hughes’ Works

The work of Langston has been greatly influenced by the life of Black Americans. In the works of Hughes, Andrew identified almost 16 themes. These themes include parental rejection, racism, miscegenation, the pride of blacks, the history of deportation, the dignity of blacks, the anger, the protest, the fight of equality, the oral tradition of Africa, social injustice, jazz, and the blues, suffering, and race. Here is a brief description of some themes explored in the works of Langston Hughes.

In the most basic sense, hybridity means mixture. The contemporary uses of the term are dispersed across several academic disciplines and are noticeable in popular culture. Basically, the term hybridity clearly demonstrates that how different cultures claim to be pure or authentic turned out to be a representation of mixture, overlap, and influence.

Langston Hughes was multicultural and mulatto. The theme of hybridity is clearly and profoundly treated in his works. For example, his poem “The Cross” is the best example of hybridity. For black and mulatto, hybridity is a burden: it is a cross to be tolerated. This poem also involves the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Just like Jesus, blacks also suffer from consistent oppression by the white people. The narrator of the poem is a mulatto, a hybrid, and is on crossroads constantly thinking about to whom he shall assimilate: white or black, or none?

The poem “Cross” is a free rhymed verse. It is written in a common and simple language. The poem is sung by the speaker “I,” who is most probably the poet himself. The theme of hybridity is hidden inside the title of the poem. The connotative meanings of the word cross are many, such as anger, bitterness, apologies, threats, crossroads, confusion, Christ’s crucifix, traversal, and crossbreed.

The goal of the speaker in the poem is to illustrate the anger, bitterness, and confusion for being and hybrid or bi-racial. In American societies, being bi-racial was the biggest problem that affects the life of bi-racial individuals and society. Such people had no identity, and they found it struggling to integrate and assimilate with society. 

The tone of the first line of the poem, “My old man’s a white, old man,” is spoken in an angry tone. The speaker is giving threats to his/her parents right from the beginning of the poem; however, when the poem progresses, somewhere in the middle, the speaker apologizes and takes back his words. The lines “I’ m sorry for that evil wish” and “I take my curses back” show that the speaker is apologizing for his threats and curses that he gave earlier. At the end of the poem, the tone of the poem turns to confusion, and the speaker does not know whom to assimilate, white or black.

The poetry of Langston Hughes is everlasting. His poetry served to be a great impact not only on his own community but also on other communities around the world. The reading of the poem “Cross” is significant as it discusses the major issues the world is facing. The poem’s concerns are the undergoing conflicted, bitter, and enigmatic conditions that make people revolt against with perseverance and determination to conquer the important values such as justice, human dignity, emancipation, elevation, and equity.

Black Pride

Langston Hughes never regarded himself as white. He was proud of being hybrid and belonging to the black race. He believes in the notion the awareness of black origin at root contains the fact that to act in full awareness of being intentionally created black by God, and this makes a person equal to all human beings. Thus, a person who is conscious about his black origin shall not submit his soul before anyone and must struggle to liberate himself against all the powers that attempt to imprison him.

In the poem “Negro” published in 1922, Hughes says that he is a Negro; his complexion is as dark as night, dark as the African depth. Similarly, in the poem “To the Black Beloved,” published in 1924, he addresses his beloved as his black and says that you are not beautiful, but you are lovely and surpasses the beauty.

Similarly, his novel “Not without Laughter” also deals with the black pride and depicts the ordinary life of black people in simple language.

The History of the Transportation of the Blacks

Hughes’ novels, short stories, and several poems deal with the theme of deportation of transportation of the black slaves through the deep and wide rivers and oceans.

In the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” published in 1921, the speaker is a black slave saying that he has known the rivers; he knows them from ancient times, even older than the “flow of human blood in the human vein.” This shows that the oppressed slaves are slaves for generations, and they have been deported to one place and other like donkeys and carts.

Crying for the black Americans, Langston Hughes, in his poem “Negro,” claims to be a singer (a black slave who has been transported) who carries his songs of sorrows “all the ways from Africa to Georgia.”

The Struggle for Equality

Langston Hughes’s writing is intensified with the issue of social equality. The major aim of Hughes in his writing is to encourage Blacks to struggle and fight for their rights for equality. He asserts that all humans are created equal; that blacks should be treated equally to white. In the poem “I Dream the World,” Hughes dreams about America, where there will be the rule of peace, love, freedom, and quality among all citizens.

In the poems, he says that he dreams about the world where no man will scorn the other man; The world full of blessing and peace; a free of any race; all sharing the bounties of the earth equally; a world where every man is free.

Since, from the beginning of the deportation of the slaves in 1562 until 1865, the African-American slaves were living in a state of misery and inhuman conditions. The year 1865 is marked as years of legal elimination of racial isolation. Hughes wrote several poems, short stories, and novels describing the miseries of black slaves in America. The poem, “Let America Be America Again,” published in 1936, echoes the miseries of black slaves.

“I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—

Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.”

The Use of the Jazz and the Blues

Music with strong rhythms is known as jazz. The music was originally created by African-American Musicians. Likewise, Blues are slow and sad music with strong rhythms. It was also developed by the musicians of African American living in the southern U.S. The blues is the style that illustrates the ill-being and originates from the songs held by blacks during their works.

Langston Hughes also employed the two styles of African American music. He would spend nights in clubs to listen to jazz music. Certainly, he was not seduced by the song; nonetheless, he was a radical follower of Black Consciousness. The only artistic form of the Black slaves was the jazz and the blues, and Hughes loved it the most.

The desire to assimilate and accept the white culture is choked by the two forms of blacks’ music, and Hughes rather celebrated the blacks’ only inheritance and creativity of art. In his book “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” that jazz for him is one of the inherent expressions of the life of Negros in America; It is the everlasting drum (tom-tom) beating in the hearts of Negros; it is the tom-tom of upheaval against the disillusionment in the world of white people; it is the tom-tom of laughter and joy, and pains absorbed in smiles.

Works Of Langston Hughes

• Mother to Son
• The Weary Blues

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