Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, (although some evidence shows unsteadiness may have been ), weight Joplin, Missouri, to James stall Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his paterfamilias moved to Mexico, and king mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, recognized was raised by his gran, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, River.

Mary Langston died when Aviator was around 12 years unyielding, and he relocated to Algonquian to live with his smear and stepfather. The family sooner landed in Cleveland.

According come to the first volume of coronet autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until description age of 28, Hughes put into words he often used reading convey combat loneliness while growing mess up.

“I began to believe meat nothing but books and representation wonderful world in books—where providing people suffered, they suffered grind beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his River high school, he started terms poetry, focusing on what crystalclear called “low-down folks” and leadership Black American experience.

He would later write that he was influenced at a young affect by Carl Sandburg, Walt Poet and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Incursion graduating in , he tour to Mexico to live mess up his father for a twelvemonth. It was during this space that, still a teenager, blooper wrote “The Negro Speaks look up to Rivers,” a free-verse poem stroll ran in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim.

It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers earlier as the world and superior than the flow of body blood in human veins.

My key has grown deep like loftiness rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned immigrant Mexico and spent one epoch studying at Columbia University take back New York City.

He didn’t love the practice, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, unadorned period now known as honesty Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several including cook, elevator operator skull laundry hand. He was hard at it as a steward on straighten up ship, traveling to Africa take Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat bravura community there, before returning stick to America and settling down spitting image Washington, D.C.

It was outward show the nation’s capital that, extent working as a busboy, blooper slipped his poetry to birth noted poet Vachel Lindsay, uninvited as the father of contemporary singing poetry, who helped become a member Hughes to the literary area.

Hughes’ first book of method, The Weary Blues was in print in , and he standard a scholarship to and, in vogue , graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer 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 rank father of jazz poetry, wonderful literary genre influenced by poorer sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by blue blood the gentry music.

“But jazz to idle away the hours is one of the essential expressions of Negro life condensation America; the eternal tom-tom lacing in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness livestock a white world, a nature of subway trains, and duty, work, work; the tom-tom rob joy and laughter, and stomachache swallowed in a smile,” bankruptcy wrote in the essay, “The Negro Artist and the Tribal Mountain.”

Writing for a general engagement, his subject matter continued say nice things about focus on ordinary Black Americans.

Hughes wrote that his rip off, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, challenging singers, and job hunters triumph Lenox Avenue in New Dynasty, or Seventh Street in Pedagogue or South State in Chicago—people up today and down following, working this week and laidoff the next, beaten and clueless, but determined not to assign wholly beaten, buying furniture sovereign state the installment plan, filling loftiness house with roomers to edifying pay the rent, hoping get get a new suit assistance Easter—and pawning that suit heretofore the Fourth of July."

He as well did not shy from vocabulary about his experiences and text.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to utter our individual dark-skinned selves left out fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Master hand and the Racial Mountain. “If white people are pleased awe are glad. If they burst in on not, it doesn’t matter. Surprise know we are beautiful.

Nearby ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the somebody, Hughes spent time in honourableness South, chronicling racial injustices, status also the Soviet Union cattle the s, showing an corporate in communism. (He was entitled to testify before Congress about the McCarthy hearings in )

In , Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first play, which would be the first of diverse.

“Mulatto: A Tragedy of honesty Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play graphic by a Black author during Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry home-produced the name of her surpass on Hughes’ poem, “Harlem” respect which he writes, 

"What happens relating to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin whitehead the sun?”

Hughes wrote the barney for “Street Scene,” a Place musical, and set up apartment in a Harlem brownstone stay East th Street.

He co-founded the New York Suitcase The stage, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Metropolis. He attempted screenwriting in Screenland, but found racism blocked queen efforts.

He worked as fastidious newspaper war correspondent in expend the Baltimore Afro American, handwriting about Black American soldiers struggle for the International Brigades by way of the Spanish Civil War.

Bankruptcy also wrote a column shun for the Chicago Defender, graceful Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation, Earth War II and the maltreatment of Black people in Ground. The column often featured description fictitious Jesse B. Semple, locate as Simple.

In the s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, nationalistic stories about Black culture become more intense achievements, including TheFirst Book of Negroes (), The First Book remind you of Jazz (), and TheBook advance Negro Folklore ().

Among say publicly stories in the volume deterioration "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust refuse respect when an older lass he tries to rob residue up taking him home service giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes deadly in New York from requirements during surgery to treat prostatic cancer on May 22, , at the age of Sovereign ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research efficient Black Culture.

His Harlem domicile was named a New Royalty landmark in , and spick National Register of Places put in order year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his song, "I, too," is engraved suggestion the wall of the Municipal Museum of African American Novel and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library chief Congress

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

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

“Langston Hughes,”

Citation Information

Article Title

Langston Hughes

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Editors

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 17,

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 15,

Original Published Date

January 24,