Langston Hughes

Early life

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on 1 February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri. For decades his birth year was given as 1902; according to the Academy of American Poets, research published in 2018 established it as 1901. His parents separated when he was young, and his father moved to Mexico. Hughes was raised largely by his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, until about age 13, then joined his mother and stepfather in Lincoln, Illinois, where he began writing poetry. The family later settled in Cleveland, and he graduated from Central High School there in 1920.

Rivers and the road

On a train journey to Mexico to see his father, as he crossed the Mississippi near St. Louis, the young Hughes wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Published in The Crisis in June 1921, it was his first poem for adults in a national magazine and became one of his best-known works. He spent a year at Columbia University, then worked odd jobs and sailed as a seaman to Africa and Europe before settling in Washington, D.C., in late 1924.

Harlem Renaissance

In 1925 his poem "The Weary Blues" won first prize in a contest held by Opportunity magazine, and in January 1926 Alfred A. Knopf published his first collection under that title. Hughes brought the rhythms of blues and jazz, and the speech of ordinary Black people, into poetry, drawing on influences he named as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. He finished his degree at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929, and his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), won the Harmon Foundation's gold medal.

Reception was not uniformly warm. Critics divided over The Weary Blues, and some Black readers objected to his frank portrayals of working-class hardship, which Hughes defended as part of the full truth of Black life.

A long career

Hughes was unusually prolific. Besides poetry he wrote eleven plays, the popular "Simple" stories, the autobiography The Big Sea (1940), and, with Arna Bontemps, the anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949. He co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston. Later collections such as Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), steeped in jazz, spoke to a new generation of artists and early civil rights activists, and he became known as the "Poet Laureate of Harlem."

Legacy

Hughes died in New York City on 22 May 1967, of complications from prostate cancer. His Harlem home at 20 East 127th Street was designated a landmark, and that stretch of street was renamed Langston Hughes Place. The critic Donald B. Gibson observed that Hughes addressed his poetry to ordinary people, and specifically to Black people.