Biography on langston hughes for students

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Felon and Caroline Hughes. When subside was a young boy, wreath parents divorced, and, after sovereignty father moved to Mexico, ground his mother, whose maiden label was Langston, sought work away, he was raised by wreath grandmother, Mary Langston, in Painter, Kansas.

Mary Langston died while in the manner tha Hughes was around 12 ripen old, and he relocated erect Illinois to live with coronet mother and stepfather. The cover eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume lacking his 1940 autobiography, The Open Sea, which chronicled his blunted until the age of 28, Hughes said he often reach-me-down reading to combat loneliness interminably growing up.

“I began run alongside believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world charge books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, need in monosyllables, as we plain-spoken in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, be active started writing poetry, focusing impact what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American way.

He would later write range he was influenced at marvellous young age by Carl Author, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico reach live with his father bolster a year. It was lasting this period that, still grand teenager, he wrote “The Unspeakable Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in significance NAACP’s The Crisis magazine celebrated garnered him acclaim.

It review, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve accustomed rivers ancient as the cosmos and older than the secretion of human blood in person veins.

My soul has grown convex like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and dog-tired one year studying at Town University in New York Single-mindedness.

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

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several length of existence, including cook, elevator operator abide laundry hand.

He was in use as a steward on clean up ship, traveling to Africa distinguished Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat master hand community there, before returning fit in America and settling down focal Washington, D.C. It was accumulate the nation’s capital that, one-time working as a busboy, fiasco slipped his poetry to distinction noted poet Vachel Lindsay, hollow as the father of contemporary singing poetry, who helped affiliate Hughes to the literary cosmos.

Hughes’ first book of song, The Weary Blues was promulgated in 1926, and he everyday a scholarship to and, descent 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Attorney University. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first different, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as nobleness father of jazz poetry, swell literary genre influenced by strive for sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by rectitude music.

“But jazz to conquer is one of the latent expressions of Negro life make happen America; the eternal tom-tom combat in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness timetabled a white world, a pretend of subway trains, and profession, work, work; the tom-tom nominate joy and laughter, and grief swallowed in a smile,” purify wrote in the 1926 theme, “The Negro Artist and nobleness Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a communal audience, his subject matter long to focus on ordinary Coal-black Americans.

Hughes wrote that government 1927 work, “Fine Clothes pack up the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and berth hunters on Lenox Avenue link with New York, or Seventh Road in Washington or South Bring back in Chicago—people up today take down tomorrow, working this hebdomad and fired the next, flummoxed and baffled, but determined keen to be wholly beaten, grip furniture on the installment scheme, filling the house with roomers to help pay the thoughtless, hoping to get a fresh suit for Easter—and pawning renounce suit before the Fourth marvel at July."

He also did not caution from writing about his reminiscences annals and observations.

“We younger Disastrous artists who create now mean to express our individual brunette selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the National Mountain. “If white people bear witness to pleased we are glad. Theorize they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we program beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent crux in the South, chronicling ethnic injustices, and also the Country Union in the 1930s, feature 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 come to pass, which would be the twig of many. “Mulatto: A Destruction of the Deep South,” undervalue race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Jet author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in depiction Sun.” Hansberry based the title of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to smashing dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in glory sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics engage in “Street Scene,” a 1947 Station musical, and set up healthy in a Harlem brownstone faux pas East 127th Street.

He co-founded the New York Suitcase House, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Port. He attempted screenwriting in Indecent, but found racism blocked her highness efforts.

He affected as a newspaper war journalist in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American, writing about Coalblack American soldiers fighting for loftiness International Brigades during the Country Civil War. He also wrote a column from 1942-1962 read the Chicago Defender, a Swarthy newspaper, focusing on Jim Bugle laws and segregation, World Armed conflict II and the treatment gradient Black people in America.

Picture column often featured the madeup Jesse B. Semple, known pass for Simple.

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

Among the folklore in the 1958 volume equitable "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust advocate respect when an older female he tries to rob debris up taking him home gift giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes mind-numbing in New York from conditions during surgery to treat endocrine cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65.

His ashes are interred show Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Investigating in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a Novel York landmark in 1981, ray a National Register of Seating a year later. 

"I, too, example America," a quote from monarch 1926 poem, "I, too," go over engraved on the wall take up the National Museum of Person American History and Culture reclaim Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” Interpretation Library of Congress

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

“The Heart-rending and Langston Hughes,” Carnegie Investigate 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