Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (born February 1, 1901?, Joplin, Missouri, U.S.—died May 22, 1967, Manhattan, New York) was an American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns.

From Joplin to Harlem

While it was long believed that Hughes was born in 1902, research released in 2018 indicated that he might have been born the previous year. His parents, Carrie Hughes (née Langston) and James Nathaniel Hughes, separated soon after his birth, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. After his grandmother’s death, he and his mother moved to half a dozen cities before reaching Cleveland, Ohio, where they settled. He wrote the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” the summer after his graduation from high school in Cleveland; it was published in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and brought him considerable attention.

Encouraged by his father to pursue a practical education, Hughes began attending Columbia University in New York City in 1921 to study at the school of mines, engineering, and chemistry. He was one of the first Black students to live in the university’s dormitory, although some accounts say that he was denied a room there and instead stayed at a local YMCA. During this time Hughes explored Harlem, forming a permanent attachment to what he called the “great dark city.” He worked at the university’s newspaper, contributing poems under the pen name Lang-Hu. His time at Columbia was for the most part unhappy, however, and he dropped out after a year. He then worked as a steward on a freighter bound for Africa and used the opportunity to also sojourn in Europe, working for a time as a doorman in Paris.

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Poetry: First Lines

Back in New York City from seafaring, he met in 1924 the writers Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten, with whom he would have lifelong influential friendships. Hughes won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize in 1925. That same year Van Vechten introduced Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who accepted the collection that Knopf would publish as The Weary Blues in 1926.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

Creating a uniquely Black literature

While working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., in late 1925, Hughes put three of his own poems beside the plate of Vachel Lindsay in the dining room. The next day, newspapers around the country reported that Lindsay, among the most popular white poets of the day, had “discovered” an African American busboy poet, which earned Hughes broader notice. Hughes received a scholarship to, and began attending, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in early 1926. That same year he received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award, and he published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation, a manifesto in which he called for a confident, uniquely Black literature:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.

By the time Hughes received a degree in 1929, he had helped launch the influential magazine Fire!!, in 1926, and he had also published a second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), which was criticized by some for its title and for its frankness, though Hughes himself felt that it represented another step forward in his writing.

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Incorporating social and political themes

A few months after Hughes’s graduation, Not Without Laughter (1930), his first prose volume, had a cordial reception. In the 1930s he turned his poetry more forcefully toward racial justice and political radicalism. He traveled in the American South in 1931 and decried the Scottsboro case, in which nine young Black men were brought to trial in Scottsboro, Alabama, after being falsely accused of raping two white women. He then traveled widely in the Soviet Union, Haiti, Japan, and elsewhere and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937) during the Spanish Civil War. He published a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and became deeply involved in theater. His play Mulatto, adapted from one of his short stories, premiered on Broadway in 1935, and productions of several other plays followed in the late 1930s. He also founded theater companies in Harlem (1937) and Los Angeles (1939). In 1940 Hughes published The Big Sea, his autobiography up to age 28. A second volume, I Wonder As I Wander, was published in 1956.

A dream deferred

Hughes’s poem cycle Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) introduced what became his most famous poem, “Harlem.” Centering on the theme of “a dream deferred,” the book captures a day in the life of Harlem and its residents. In its language and style Hughes drew influence from African American music. Hughes explained in the book’s preface:

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.

“Harlem” offers a concise example of Hughes’s poetic craft and his pinpointing of themes central to African American history. In 11 lines the poem alludes to the Great Migration, which had caused places such as Harlem to experience population booms; race riots such as those that had erupted in Harlem in 1935 and 1943; and the emerging civil rights movement. For further discussion of this poem and its influence, see Harlem.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

Documenting African American culture and posthumous works

Hughes documented African American literature and culture in works such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Bontemps). He continued to write numerous works for the stage, including the lyrics for Street Scene, an opera with music by Kurt Weill that premiered in 1947. Black Nativity (1961; film 2013) is a gospel play that uses Hughes’s poetry, along with gospel standards and scriptural passages, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus. It was an international success, and performances of the work—often diverging substantially from the original—became a Christmas tradition in many Black churches and cultural centers. He also continued to write poetry until his death; The Panther and the Lash, published posthumously in 1967, reflected and engaged with the Black Power movement and, specifically, the Black Panther Party, which was founded the previous year.

Among his other writings, Hughes translated the poetry of Spanish writer Federico García Lorca and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. He was also widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who appeared in Hughes’s columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, appeared in 1994. Some of his political exchanges were collected as Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (2016).