Last reviewed: June 2017
Harlem Renaissance poet, dramatist, and essayist
February 1, 1902
Joplin, Missouri
May 22, 1967
New York, New York
Few authors of the twentieth century are more significant than Langston Hughes. The length of his career, the variety of his output, his influence on three generations of African American writers, his concern for the “ordinary” African American, and his introduction of the jazz idiom to American poetry assure his status. Hughes’s father, James Nathaniel Hughes, left his family when Hughes was a baby and eventually became a prosperous lawyer and rancher in Mexico. Langston Hughes’s mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, who had attended college and had an artistic temperament, had great difficulty supporting her family. As a result, much of Hughes’s childhood was spent in Lawrence, Kansas, with his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, a proud woman who was the last surviving widow of John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He also stayed briefly with his mother in Topeka, Kansas, and in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and he traveled with her to see his father in Mexico when he was seven.
After his mother married Homer Clark, the family moved to Lincoln, Illinois, and then to Cleveland, Ohio. There Hughes published poems in his high school magazine and edited the yearbook. After graduation, he spent an extended period of time with his father in Mexico, where he had articles, poems, and a children’s play accepted for publication. In 1921 he enrolled at Columbia University but quickly lost interest in his studies. Two years later Hughes traveled to Africa and Europe as a sailor. Langston Hughes
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In 1925 he won an Opportunity poetry prize. A conversation with Carl Van Vechten at the awards ceremony led to the publication of The Weary Blues. Reaction to his book in the white press was generally positive, but many middle-class African American publications were angered by Hughes’s depictions of common African American life and dialect. With the assistance of patrons, Hughes attended Lincoln University and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1929. His first novel, Not Without Laughter, was published the following year.
Determined to earn his living as a writer, Hughes used a Rosenwald Fund grant to tour black colleges in the South. His readings were sometimes controversial, but the exposure helped to establish him as the major poetic voice of black America. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, but despite sympathy for many achievements of the Russian Revolution, Hughes never became as deeply involved in leftist politics as did some of his contemporaries.
In the late 1930’s Hughes used grant money to establish African American theatrical groups in Harlem and Chicago that produced several of his plays. In 1943 he wrote the first of his Simple columns for the Chicago Defender. After the war he published Cuba Libre, a book of translations, and edited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, with Arna Bontemps. During the 1950’s Hughes wrote a series of history texts, some aimed at children, on African Americans and black culture.
During his long career Hughes was harshly criticized by blacks and whites. Because he left no single masterwork, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and because he consciously wrote in the common idiom of the people, academic interest in him grew only slowly. Despite that criticism, Hughes did receive some recognition for his work during his lifetime, including a 1935 Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and the 1960 Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Furthermore, the importance of his influence on several generations of African American authors is indisputable and widely acknowledged.
Hughes battled prostate cancer and died of complications of the illness in New York City on May 22, 1967. In the decades following Hughes's death, respect for the late writer grew and volumes of previously unpublished correspondence and collections of his activist and political writings were made publicly available. The 1990s and 2000s saw the republication of several of his most famous poems as illustrated children's books, bringing his legacy to a new generation of readers.