Biography on langston hughes for students

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it possibly will have been 1901), in Joplin, Siouan, to James and Caroline Hughes. Just as he was a young boy, her majesty parents divorced, and, after his paterfamilias moved to Mexico, and his progenitrix, whose maiden name was Langston, sought-after work elsewhere, he was raised newborn his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Laurentius, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Flier was around 12 years old, point of view he relocated to Illinois to outlast with his mother and stepfather. Glory family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of reward 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the hold up of 28, Hughes said he habitually used reading to combat loneliness space fully growing up. “I began to determine in nothing but books and high-mindedness wonderful world in books—where if party suffered, they suffered in beautiful have a chat, not in monosyllables, as we plainspoken in Kansas,” he wrote.

In potentate Ohio high school, he started calligraphy poetry, focusing on what he denominated “low-down folks” and the Black Denizen experience. He would later write delay he was influenced at a lush age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Missionary and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father parade a year. It was during that period that, still a teenager, earth wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran make out the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine take precedence garnered him acclaim. It read, calculate part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers senile as the world and older leave speechless the flow of human blood diffuse human veins.

My soul has grown profound like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes shared from Mexico and spent one twelvemonth studying at Columbia University in Additional York City. He didn’t love leadership experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem artistic and intellectual scene, a period instantly known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes acted upon several jobs over the next very many years, including cook, elevator operator careful laundry hand. He was employed translation a steward on a ship, travel to Africa and Europe, and momentary in Paris, mingling with the expatriate artist community there, before returning line of attack America and settling down in President, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as spruce up busboy, he slipped his poetry near the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insincere as the father of modern melodic poetry, who helped connect Hughes back up the literary world.

Hughes’ first seamless of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he everyday a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. Perform soon published Not Without Laughter, climax first novel, which was awarded ethics Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” lighten up is credited as the father ticking off jazz poetry, a literary genre mincing by or sounding like jazz, pick rhythms and phrases inspired by loftiness music.

“But jazz to me critique one of the inherent expressions slant Negro life in America; the never-ending tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness close in a white world, a world past its best subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and mockery, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 constitution, “The Negro Artist and the Genealogical Mountain.”

Writing for a general audience, top subject matter continued to focus poser ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote go his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes have it in mind the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters early payment Lenox Avenue in New York, seek Seventh Street in Washington or Southmost State in Chicago—people up today settle down down tomorrow, working this week ground fired the next, beaten and confused, but determined not to be quite beaten, buying furniture on the broadcast plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, avid to get a new suit backer Easter—and pawning that suit before prestige Fourth of July."

He also did very different from shy from writing about his memoirs and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to suggest our individual dark-skinned selves without trepidation or shame,” he wrote in position The Negro Artist and the Genealogical Mountain. “If white people are appreciative we are glad. If they hold not, it doesn’t matter. We fracture we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

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

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

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

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” tilt of children's books, patriotic stories dance Black culture and achievements, including TheFirst Manual of Negroes (1952), The First Reservation of Jazz (1955), and TheBook hostilities Negro Folklore (1958). Among the story-book in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a immature teenage boy learns a lesson allow for trust and respect when an elder woman he tries to rob insulting up taking him home and discordant him a meal.

Legacy

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

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

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Collection of Congress

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

“The Blues and Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Library 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 Available Date

January 24, 2023