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Langston
Hughes |
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1902 - 1967 |
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A n American poet, novelist,
playwright, short story writer, and newspaper columnist Langston Hughes is
best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. Born
James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri.
His parents divorced when he was a small child,
and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he
was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother
and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio.
It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following
graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University.
During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and
a busboy, and travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In
November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry,
The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his
college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later.
In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal
for literature.languages. |
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Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl
Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for
his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties
through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as
poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the
influence it had on his writing, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred." His life
and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the
period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to
differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black
America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected
their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music,
laughter, and language itself.
Langston Hughes died of complications from
prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20
East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by
the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been
renamed "Langston Hughes Place."
In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic
work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the
well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim,Simple
Takes a Wife, and Simple's Uncle Sam. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of
the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography (The
Big Sea) and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston. |
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