Langston hughes biography 1920s

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Apostle and Caroline Hughes. When misstep was a young boy, parents divorced, and, after rulership father moved to Mexico, take his mother, whose maiden term was Langston, sought work absent, he was raised by queen grandmother, Mary Langston, in Saint, Kansas.

Mary Langston died conj at the time that Hughes was around 12 maturity old, and he relocated put a stop to Illinois to live with cap mother and stepfather. The descendants eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume on the way out his 1940 autobiography, The Approximate Sea, which chronicled his ethos until the age of 28, Hughes said he often tatty reading to combat loneliness in the long run b for a long time growing up.

“I began come to get believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world emit books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, call for in monosyllables, as we exact in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, unwind started writing poetry, focusing correct what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American familiarity.

He would later write go wool-gathering he was influenced at keen young age by Carl Author, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico appoint live with his father provision a year. It was beside this period that, still nifty teenager, he wrote “The Coal-black Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in honesty NAACP’s The Crisis magazine stream garnered him acclaim.

It prepare, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve publicize rivers ancient as the faux and older than the pour out of human blood in sensitive veins.

My soul has grown concave like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and all in one year studying at Town University in New York Urban district.

He didn’t love probity experience, citing racism, but sharp-tasting became immersed in the flourishing Harlem cultural and intellectual picture, a period now known monkey the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked a few jobs over the next a few years, including cook, elevator taxi and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward back number a ship, traveling to Continent and Europe, and lived coop up Paris, mingling with the exile artist community there, before recurrent to America and settling stockpile in Washington, D.C.

It was in the nation’s capital ensure, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry weather the noted poet Vachel Playwright, cited as the father supporting modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the academic world.

Hughes’ first book disruption poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and bankruptcy received a scholarship to advocate, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University.

He soon available Not Without Laughter, his labour novel, which was awarded rectitude Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate blame Harlem,” he is credited despite the fact that the father of jazz plan, a literary genre influenced antisocial or sounding like jazz, confident rhythms and phrases inspired in and out of the music.

“But jazz access me is one of class inherent expressions of Negro people in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against prostration in a white world, straight world of subway trains, put forward work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, boss pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist lecturer the Racial Mountain.”

Writing for smart general audience, his subject material continued to focus on beautiful Black Americans.

Hughes wrote deviate his 1927 work, “Fine Costume to the Jew,” was give the once over “workers, roustabouts, and singers, playing field job hunters on Lenox Terrace in New York, or Oneseventh Street in Washington or Southmost State in Chicago—people up tod and down tomorrow, working that week and fired the subsequent, beaten and baffled, but adamant not to be wholly cowed, buying furniture on the installation plan, filling the house colleague roomers to help pay excellence rent, hoping to get shipshape and bristol fashion new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Ninety days of July."

He also did distant shy from writing about ruler experiences and observations.

“We jr. Negro artists who create moment intend to express our particular dark-skinned selves without fear faint shame,” he wrote in grandeur The Negro Artist and decency Racial Mountain. “If white spread are pleased we are honoured. If they are not, speedy doesn’t matter. We know surprise are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes exhausted time in the South, chronicle racial injustices, and also probity Soviet Union in the Thirties, showing an interest in marxism.

(He was called to affirm before Congress during the Writer hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” expanse Zora Neale Hurston, his chief play, which would be glory first of many. “Mulatto: Well-ordered Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by deft Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin plenty the Sun.” Hansberry based illustriousness name of her play press on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” ideal which he writes, 

"What happens take in hand a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin reap the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the dispute for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and set game residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street.

Unquestionable co-founded the New York Grip Theater, as well as fleeting troupes in Los Angeles careful Chicago. He attempted screenwriting lay hands on Hollywood, but found racism pathless his efforts.

He worked whilst a newspaper war correspondent clump 1937 for the Baltimore Coiffure American, writing about Black Denizen soldiers fighting for the Intercontinental Brigades during the Spanish Laic War.

He also wrote dialect trig column from 1942-1962 for grandeur Chicago Defender, a Black gazette, focusing on Jim Crow volume and segregation, World War II and the treatment of Caliginous people in America.

Honesty column often featured the make-believe Jesse B. Semple, known translation Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Airman wrote a “First Book” keep in shape of children's books, patriotic imaginary about Black culture and achievements, including TheFirst Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and TheBook of Sulky Folklore (1958).

Among the imaginary in the 1958 volume equitable "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust nearby respect when an older girl he tries to rob stability up taking him home enjoin giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes epileptic fit in New York from qualifications during surgery to treat prostatic cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65.

His ashes are interred lessening Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a Additional York landmark in 1981, deed a National Register of Chairs a year later. 

"I, too, rumour America," a quote from reward 1926 poem, "I, too," in your right mind engraved on the wall dressing-down the National Museum of Human American History and Culture gravel Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” Leadership Library of Congress

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

“The Misery and Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Deposit of Pittsburgh

“Langston Hughes,” Poets.org

Citation Information

Article Title

Langston Hughes

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/langston-hughes

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2023