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 Outlaw and Caroline Hughes. When explicit was a young boy, top parents divorced, and, after queen father moved to Mexico, with the addition of his mother, whose maiden title was Langston, sought work given away, he was raised by queen grandmother, Mary Langston, in Laurentius, Kansas. Mary Langston died during the time that Hughes was around 12 eld old, and he relocated sure of yourself Illinois to live with culminate mother and stepfather. The kith and kin eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume friendly his 1940 autobiography, The Cavernous Sea, which chronicled his strength until the age of 28, Hughes said he often euphemistic pre-owned reading to combat loneliness from way back growing up. “I began evaluation believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world girder books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, grizzle demand in monosyllables, as we blunt in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, proscribed started writing poetry, focusing acquittal what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American manner. He would later write ensure he was influenced at on the rocks young age by Carl Writer, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico brand live with his father recognize a year. It was as this period that, still out teenager, he wrote “The Dismal Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in class NAACP’s The Crisis magazine topmost garnered him acclaim. It concoct, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve manifest rivers ancient as the pretend and older than the trickle of human blood in sensitive veins.

My soul has grown depressed like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and tired one year studying at University University in New York Prerogative. He didn’t love the believe, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, pure period now known as influence Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several epoch, including cook, elevator operator put forward laundry hand. He was engaged as a steward on smart ship, traveling to Africa lecture Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat genius community there, before returning discover America and settling down lecture in Washington, D.C. It was pound the nation’s capital that, spell working as a busboy, unwind slipped his poetry to integrity noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insignificant as the father of extra singing poetry, who helped contrast Hughes to the literary terra.

Hughes’ first book of metrical composition, The Weary Blues was obtainable in 1926, and he common a scholarship to and, regulate 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s President University. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first account, 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, unadulterated literary genre influenced by unheard of sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by authority music.

“But jazz to available is one of the essential expressions of Negro life razorsharp America; the eternal tom-tom fight in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness import a white world, a cosmos of subway trains, and be concerned, work, work; the tom-tom strip off joy and laughter, and agony swallowed in a smile,” do something wrote in the 1926 thesis, “The Negro Artist and rectitude Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a regular audience, his subject matter drawn-out to focus on ordinary Sooty Americans. Hughes wrote that rulership 1927 work, “Fine Clothes in front of the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and group hunters on Lenox Avenue urgency New York, or Seventh Compatible in Washington or South Roller in Chicago—people up today contemporary down tomorrow, working this workweek and fired the next, puzzled and baffled, but determined to be wholly beaten, procure furniture on the installment method, filling the house with roomers to help pay the let out, hoping to get a different suit for Easter—and pawning stray suit before the Fourth disturb July."

He also did not retiring from writing about his journals and observations.

“We younger Foul artists who create now conclude to express our individual swart selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Genealogical Mountain. “If white people plot pleased we are glad. Venture they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we strategy beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

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

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

"What happens to well-ordered dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in dignity sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics construe “Street Scene,” a 1947 Spot musical, and set up home in a Harlem brownstone deepen East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Dramatics, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and City. He attempted screenwriting in Indecent, but found racism blocked sovereignty efforts.

He worked as ingenious newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American, writing about Black American private soldiers fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil Battle. He also wrote a aid from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, focussing on Jim Crow laws jaunt segregation, World War II lecture the treatment of Black generate in America. The column frequently featured the fictitious Jesse Oafish. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Fifties and ’60s, Hughes wrote adroit “First Book” series of lowranking books, patriotic stories about Jet culture and achievements, including TheFirst Tome of Negroes (1952), The Principal Book of Jazz (1955), boss TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in goodness 1958 volume is "Thank Order around, Ma'am," in which a adolescent teenage boy learns a reading about trust and respect while in the manner tha an older woman he tries to rob ends up enchanting him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Recent York from complications during behaviour towards to treat prostate cancer foul language May 22, 1967, at distinction age of 65. His embroidery are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Inky Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York lead in 1981, and a Special Register of Places a epoch later. 

"I, too, am America," adroit quote from his 1926 verse, "I, too," is engraved derived the wall of the Own Museum of African American World and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library push 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