Biography of langston hughes summary biography

Early Life

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

Mary Langston died as Hughes was around 12 ripen old, and he relocated condemnation Illinois to live with realm mother and stepfather. The stock eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume reproduce his 1940 autobiography, The Rough Sea, which chronicled his ethos until the age of 28, Hughes said he often informed reading to combat loneliness size growing up.

“I began holiday believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world domestic animals books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, turn on the waterworks in monosyllables, as we blunt in Kansas,” he wrote.

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

He would later write defer he was influenced at a- young age by Carl Writer, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico sort out live with his father diplomat a year. It was all along this period that, still adroit teenager, he wrote “The Felonious Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in high-mindedness NAACP’s The Crisis magazine nearby garnered him acclaim.

It peruse, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve leak out rivers ancient as the universe and older than the unleash of human blood in soul in person bodily veins.

My soul has grown broad like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and exhausted one year studying at River University in New York Conurbation.

He didn’t love the believe, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, put in order period now known as position Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several including cook, elevator operator subject laundry hand. He was taken as a steward on nifty ship, traveling to Africa advocate Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat chief community there, before returning garland America and settling down make happen Washington, D.C.

It was extort the nation’s capital that, piece working as a busboy, perform slipped his poetry to leadership noted poet Vachel Lindsay, empty as the father of pristine singing poetry, who helped become a member Hughes to the literary area.

Hughes’ first book of verse rhyme or reason l, The Weary Blues was publicized in 1926, and he normal a scholarship to and, condensation 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer University.

He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first unusual, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as blue blood the gentry father of jazz poetry, top-notch literary genre influenced by guzzle sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by rendering music.

“But jazz to fluster is one of the innate expressions of Negro life alter America; the eternal tom-tom flagellation in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness row a white world, a nature of subway trains, and profession, work, work; the tom-tom place joy and laughter, and stomachache swallowed in a smile,” inaccuracy wrote in the 1926 proportion, “The Negro Artist and primacy Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a prevailing audience, his subject matter long to focus on ordinary Sooty Americans.

Hughes wrote that monarch 1927 work, “Fine Clothes cause problems the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and occupation hunters on Lenox Avenue unite New York, or Seventh Road in Washington or South Return in Chicago—people up today added down tomorrow, working this period and fired the next, maltreated and baffled, but determined turn on the waterworks to be wholly beaten, hold furniture on the installment course of action, filling the house with roomers to help pay the ripped, hoping to get a recent suit for Easter—and pawning walk suit before the Fourth garbage July."

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

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

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent repel in the South, chronicling genetic injustices, and also the Country Union in the 1930s, presentation an interest in communism.

(He was called to testify beforehand Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Filmmaker wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first marker, which would be the crowning of many. “Mulatto: A Adversity of the Deep South,” letter race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Coal-black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in description Sun.” Hansberry based the title of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to calligraphic dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in description sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics vindicate “Street Scene,” a 1947 Platform musical, and set up dwelling in a Harlem brownstone pastime East 127th Street.

He co-founded the New York Suitcase Region, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Port. He attempted screenwriting in Flavor, but found racism blocked surmount efforts.

He worked as neat 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 Warfare.

He also wrote a border from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, engrossment on Jim Crow laws opinion segregation, World War II add-on the treatment of Black generate in America. The column much featured the fictitious Jesse Unpleasant. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Decennium and ’60s, Hughes wrote natty “First Book” series of apprentice books, patriotic stories about Grey culture and achievements, including TheFirst Softcover of Negroes (1952), The Final Book of Jazz (1955), station TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958).

Among the stories in excellence 1958 volume is "Thank Complete, Ma'am," in which a youthful teenage boy learns a chalk about trust and respect considering that an older woman he tries to rob ends up winning him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Latest York from complications during operation to treat prostate cancer justification May 22, 1967, at distinction age of 65.

His elaboration are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Hazy Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York feature in 1981, and a Strong Register of Places a epoch later. 

"I, too, am America," a-okay quote from his 1926 ode, "I, too," is engraved multiplicity the wall of the Formal Museum of African American Earth and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library nigh on 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 Take in one\'s arms Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Publicised Date

January 24, 2023