Langston Hughes was an American author of the Harlem Renaissance, known for his poetry, novels, short stories, plays, operas, and translations. He celebrated the African American experience and portrayed it honestly. Hughes attended Columbia University but left due to racial prejudice and his interest in the Harlem community. He died in 1967 and is remembered as one of America’s favorite and most influential poets.
Langston Hughes was an American author of the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African-American culture in the Harlem community of New York City in the 1920s. Today he is best known for his poetry, but he has also written novels, short stories, plays, operas, two autobiographies, newspaper articles and translations of English literature. His poetry is often characterized as jazz poetry, reflecting the rhythms and quality of jazz music, another art form that flourished during the Harlem Renaissance.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902. His parents, Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes, divorced when Langston was very young and he spent most of his childhood at his grandmother’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. When he was 13, his grandmother died and he moved with family friends and later his mother and stepfather to Lincoln, Illinois. Hughes’ family moved a lot in search of work and he ended up attending high school in Cleveland, Ohio.
The author’s literary talents began to emerge in his childhood, when he was designated “class poet” in elementary school. He began writing short stories, plays, poems, and pieces for the school newspaper in high school, and was an avid reader.
Hughes paid a brief visit to his father, who had moved to Mexico shortly after their divorce, in 1919, the year before he graduated from high school. After graduating, he lived with his father for a while, trying to get him to pay tuition at Columbia University. Their relationship was strained and he later wrote that his father had intense self-hatred because of his race with which the young man could not identify. Although Hughes’ father wanted him to attend college outside of the United States, he eventually agreed to pay for his son’s education at Columbia on the condition that he study engineering.
Langston Hughes did well at Columbia but left after his freshman year due to racial prejudice and his heightened interest in the nearby Harlem community and its music and art scene. He supported himself with various jobs during the early 1920s and spent some time in Paris in 1923-24 after a six-month stint on a ship en route to Europe and West Africa. After returning to Harlem, Hughes was discovered by the poet Vachel Lindsay during his job as a hotel waiter. His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926.
He continued to be a successful writer and icon of the Harlem Renaissance throughout his life. Hughes attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a BA in 1929 and a BA in 1943. He published his first novel, Not Without Laughter, in 1930, and a volume of short stories, The Ways of White Folk, in 1934 In addition to his literary work, Hughes has founded theater companies in Los Angeles and Chicago and has spoken as a guest lecturer at several universities.
In his writings, Langston Hughes celebrated the African American experience and sought to portray it honestly. His poetry is often anthologized and he is remembered as one of America’s favorite and most influential poets. Hughes died of post-surgical complications on May 22, 1967. His ashes are buried in Harlem, under the floor of the atrium leading to the Langston Hughes Auditorium in the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture.
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