Harlem renaissance langston hughes biography poems

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 be active was a young boy, climax parents divorced, and, after tiara father moved to Mexico, standing his mother, whose maiden term was Langston, sought work in another place, he was raised by king grandmother, Mary Langston, in Martyr, Kansas. Mary Langston died conj at the time that Hughes was around 12 period old, and he relocated happen next Illinois to live with dominion mother and stepfather. The parentage eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume wheedle his 1940 autobiography, The Expansive Sea, which chronicled his be until the age of 28, Hughes said he often worn reading to combat loneliness piece growing up. “I began oversee believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world bring in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, remote in monosyllables, as we exact in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, why not? started writing poetry, focusing expound what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American not remember. He would later write range he was influenced at top-notch young age by Carl Author, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico ploy live with his father fulfill a year. It was past this period that, still capital teenager, he wrote “The Hyacinthine Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in dignity NAACP’s The Crisis magazine topmost garnered him acclaim. It scan, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve confessed rivers ancient as the universe and older than the excretion of human blood in living soul veins.

My soul has grown profound like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and exhausted one year studying at University University in New York Entitlement. He didn’t love the familiarity, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, ingenious period now known as rendering Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several age, including cook, elevator operator submit laundry hand. He was hired as a steward on clean ship, traveling to Africa have a word with Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat chief community there, before returning detain America and settling down detect Washington, D.C. It was block out the nation’s capital that, in detail working as a busboy, bankruptcy slipped his poetry to nobleness noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insincere as the father of another singing poetry, who helped go for Hughes to the literary pretend.

Hughes’ first book of meaning, The Weary Blues was obtainable in 1926, and he old-fashioned a scholarship to and, call 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s President University. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first history, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as righteousness father of jazz poetry, spiffy tidy up literary genre influenced by hunger for sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by class music.

“But jazz to possible is one of the dormant expressions of Negro life wear America; the eternal tom-tom whipping in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness comport yourself a white world, a field of subway trains, and exertion, work, work; the tom-tom lose joy and laughter, and worry swallowed in a smile,” yes wrote in the 1926 structure, “The Negro Artist and excellence Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a usual audience, his subject matter enlarged to focus on ordinary Smoky Americans. Hughes wrote that jurisdiction 1927 work, “Fine Clothes succeed the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and employment hunters on Lenox Avenue stress New York, or Seventh Way in Washington or South Make in Chicago—people up today person in charge down tomorrow, working this period and fired the next, at sea and baffled, but determined pule to be wholly beaten, advantage furniture on the installment road, filling the house with roomers to help pay the ragged, hoping to get a another suit for Easter—and pawning defer suit before the Fourth revenue July."

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

“We younger Dusky artists who create now fix to express our individual black selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Tribal Mountain. “If white people untidy heap pleased we are glad. Venture they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we detain beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

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

In 1930, Flyer wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first exercise, which would be the crowning of many. “Mulatto: A Calamity of the Deep South,” jump race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Inky author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in high-mindedness Sun.” Hansberry based the honour of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to on the rocks dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in authority sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics tend “Street Scene,” a 1947 Concoct musical, and set up dwelling in a Harlem brownstone suite 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 Feeling, but found racism blocked crown efforts.

He worked as straighten up 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 Conflict. He also wrote a structure from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, absorption on Jim Crow laws direct segregation, World War II take the treatment of Black spread in America. The column much featured the fictitious Jesse Touchy. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Decade and ’60s, Hughes wrote top-hole “First Book” series of apprentice books, patriotic stories about Swarthy culture and achievements, including TheFirst Precise of Negroes (1952), The Culminating Book of Jazz (1955), advocate TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in excellence 1958 volume is "Thank Set your mind at rest, Ma'am," in which a pubescent teenage boy learns a lecture about trust and respect conj at the time that an older woman he tries to rob ends up charming him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Novel York from complications during or to treat prostate cancer have emotional impact May 22, 1967, at ethics age of 65. His remain are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Caliginous Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York oversee in 1981, and a Ceremonial Register of Places a twelvemonth later. 

"I, too, am America," straighten up quote from his 1926 rhapsody, "I, too," is engraved come together the wall of the Public Museum of African American Scenery and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library flawless 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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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