Langston Hughes ( 1902 - 1967 )

His Life:

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and was the son of James Nathaniel and Carrie Langston Hughes. Hughes's mother was an educated, creative woman. She had attended college, demonstrating talents in drama and poetry.

His father dreamed of becoming a lawyer, studying law through correspondence courses. Turned away from the Oklahoma Territory bar examination by members of its all-white examining board, he moved with his wife to Missouri. From there, he left for Cuba and then went on to Mexico, where he became a wealthy attorney and landowner. Hughes was seventeen before he saw his father again. He was shocked by his father's materialism and racism, by his tendency to dismiss blacks, Mexicans, and others as lazy and incompetent.

Hughes's mother had had to accept primary financial responsibility for herself and her son, moving frequently to search for work. Until he was twelve, Hughes spent most of his time with his maternal grandmother, Mary Leary Langston, the first black woman to have attended Oberlin College. She inspired in him a love of books and helped him understand how absolutely necessary it was to become educated. A proud woman of Native American and African American blood, she also helped her son sort out and accept his heritage.

In The Big Sea, he wrote, "There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family.... I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow. On my father's side ... both male great-grandparents were white.... On my mother's side, I had a paternal great-grandfather ... who was white and who lived in Louisa County, Virginia, before the Civil War, and who had several colored children by a colored housekeeper, who was his slave."

Hughes's grandmother was also a marvelous storyteller, narrating "long beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free." Hughes emphasized in The Big Sea that "through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying." And so when his grandmother died in 1914, Hughes declared that "I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."

For the next year, Hughes was cared for by friends of his grandmother, a couple he called Auntie and Uncle Reed. "Both of them were very good and kind," he wrote, "the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well."

In 1915 Hughes rejoined his mother, who had just recently remarried and was living in Lincoln, Illinois. It was there that Hughes graduated from grammar school. Designated the "class poet," he read one of his verses at his school's commencement exercises. The following year, the family moved to Cleveland, where Hughes attended Central High and wrote poems for the "Belfry Owl", the student magazine.

During his high school years, Hughes read avidly and widely. He said that his early poetry was heavily influenced by "little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar's and poems without rhyme like [Carl] Sandburg's"; his literary tastes were shaped by Edna Ferber, Theodore Dreiser and Guy de Maupassant (whose works he read in French).

While on his way to visit his father in Mexico in July, 1920, Hughes drafted one of his most famous poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." (See below) During the year he spent in Mexico, Hughes argued with his father about the advantages of an American versus a European education, attended bullfights, and, according to Gwendolyn Brooks in the New York Times Book Review, grew to hate his father for his materialistic and racial wrongheadedness. Brooks says that Hughes was convinced his father "hated Negroes," and that he "hated himself, too, for being a Negro."

After returning to the States, Hughes attended Columbia University for a year beginning in 1921. Feeling stifled, he dropped out to form associations with those who, together with himself, would be responsible for the Harlem Renaissance (the post-World War I African American literary movement). He also worked as cabin boy on a ship, spent time in Africa, and continued to publish poems in Crisis and elsewhere. He spent most of 1923 and 1924 in Paris, where he developed a close friendship with Arna Bontemps that would last a lifetime.

In 1923, Hughes traveled abroad on a freighter to the Senegal, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Belgium Congo, Angola, and Guinea in Africa, and later to Italy and France, Russia and Spain. One of his favorite pastimes whether abroad or in Washington, D.C. or Harlem, New York was sitting in the clubs listening to blues, jazz and writing poetry. Through these experiences a new rhythm emerged in his writing, and a series of poems such as "The Weary Blues" were penned.

He returned to Harlem, in 1924, the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. During this period, his work was frequently published and his writing flourished.

In 1925 he moved to Washington, D.C., still spending more time in blues and jazz clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...(these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." At this same time, Hughes accepted a job with Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro Life and History and founder of Black History Week in 1926. He returned to his beloved Harlem later that year.

Langston Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. degree in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Litt.D by his alma mater; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940. Based on a conversation with a man he knew in a Harlem bar, he created a character know as My Simple Minded Friend in a series of essays in the form of a dialogue. In 1950, he named this lovable character Jess B. Simple, and authored a series of books on him.

His Books:

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman. Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.

Sometimes called the Poet Laureate of Black America, Langston Hughes was also an accomplished writer of fiction, with a novel and several collections of stories to his credit. This collection brings together nearly 50 of Hughes's best stories. Many are drawn from three earlier collections, but some are between book covers for the first time. Of special note for anyone interested in Hughes's development as a writer are three stories written when Hughes was a high school student in Cleveland.

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

No other writer in America has been as "on-the-mark" with the pulse of Black America than Langston Hughes. Sometimes humerous, often touching, but, most often, hard-hitting and reflective, Hughes wrote from his experience as well as the experiences of what it is to be black in America. All of his significant works are here: the "Simple stories," the epic "Montage to a Dream Deferred," poems designed chiefly for children, plus articles and speeches made in his later years.

After his travels on several ships and the taste of his first successes(and failures), he simply explores and writes: of Paris, Russia, and Cuba, and shares his experiences with the reader. His writing is so rich and vivid that he makes every location in the world seem like poetry in motion. Mr.Hughes touches on everything human: from the strained relationship with his father to the blatant racism he encounters everyday; to the women he becomes fond of and his neverending thirst for experience and knowledge; to the countless sights of wonder in the world that one never sees when they are ignorant. Beautiful writing by a true poet.

Find out more about Langston Hughes and His Poetry at these websites:

Poets.org

Poemfinder.com

His Poetry: