Langston Hughes is perhaps the best known African American poet. His work was not limited to poetry; he also wrote plays, short stories and novels. A literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes said he wrote "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America."

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a businessman and a lawyer, and his mother, Carrie Mercer (Langston) Hughes was a teacher. They separated shortly after he was born, and Langston's father moved to Mexico. Langston went to live with his grandmother. His grandmother told him about African American heroes like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and took him to hear Booker T. Washington speak. She introduced him to The Crisis, the publication edited by W.E.B. Dubois. He lived with her until she died, when he was twelve. After that, he lived alternately with friends of his grandmother and with his mother, with some extended visits to his father in Mexico. By the time he was fourteen he had lived in Joplin; Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Lawrence, Kansas; Topeka, Kansas; Kansas City; Colorado Springs; Lincoln, Illinois; and Mexico City. He began writing poetry in elementary school and in high school his poems and short stories were published in his school newspaper. On his own he read the works of Walt Whitman, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, and other modern poets.

After he graduated from Central High School in Cleveland he travelled to Mexico to stay with his father, and to teach English. On the train trip to Mexico he wrote the poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which was published in The Crisis. Langston's father agreed to pay for his college education and he returned to the U.S. to attend Columbia University. The university is located near Harlem, and here Hughes was introduced to the exciting artistic and intellectual life that was blossoming in prosperous African American Harlem during the early nineteen twenties. (See The Harlem Renaissance)He spent a year at Columbia taking classes in mining engineering, but the subject failed to inspire him and he quit school, disappointing his father. Langston joined the crew of a freighter bound for Africa and travelled to many ports, finally making his way to Paris where he worked as a doorman at a nightclub. He remained in Paris for about a year, continuing to write all the while. After spending some time in Italy, Hughes returned to the United States where he moved in with his mother and younger brother in Washington, D.C., working in a laundry until he became a research assistant to the noted historian Dr. Carter Woodson. Research turned out not to be his cup of tea, and neither was Washington, D.C. He moved back to Harlem where he spent most of his life.

Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926 by the prestigious Alfred Knopf publishing house. By this time, he had made friends with contemporary literary figures such as Carl von Vechten, who helped him get the book published. Hughes worked at various menial jobs while his literary career continued to grow in success and fame. There was a well-known incident in which Hughes, working as a busboy in the restaurant of a fancy hotel, was serving the poet Vachel Lindsay and his wife. He left some of his poems on the table, and Lindsay read them at a poetry reading, thinking he had discovered an unknown poet. Although Hughes had already been published quite a bit, this incident brought him a lot of welcome publicity across the country. As was customary for artists in that time, Hughes soon had a wealthy patron, Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason. Later that year he was awarded a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he earned his bachelor's degree.

Hughes became one of the first African American authors who could support himself by his writing. He won poetry contests and had poems published by mainstream magazines such as Vanity Fair. He created a popular fictional character, "Jesse B. Semple," also known as "Simple," who appeared in humorous pieces in the nationally distributed African American newspaper, The Chicago Defender, for which Hughes wrote a weekly column. Simple was inspired by a conversation that Hughes had with an street-wise but uneducated defense-plant worker in 1943. The character voiced unconventional opinions about social issues, racism, and hypocrisy in American society. Some African American intellectuals objected to the "Simple" sketches and some of Hughes's other writings because they thought Hughes was not presenting the "best" aspects of African Americans to White readers. Hughes ignored this type of thinking, believing those critics to be stuffy and pretentious. Hughes had a warm and outgoing personality, and had many friends, including Ernest Hemingway. He never married, and in later years people speculated about his sexual preference, but in some ways he was a private person and nobody really knows.

One of Hughes's plays, "The Mulatto," had a long run on Broadway. During the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s he was questioned by a Senate committee because of some writings he had done in the 1930s and because he had taken a trip to Russia during that decade; he denied ever being a Communist and did not name anybody who was. Hughes edited numerous works, translated poetry from Spanish, wrote several books for children, lectured, and won many awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim fellowship and the NAACP's Springarn Medal. He remained a prolific writer until he died at the age of sixty-five. I hope you will be inspired to read some of the work of this great American poet. Here is a poem to get you started:

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Click here for more poems by Langston Hughes.

Susan Robinson
5.9.05 Republished

Home