Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. Hughes is known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Life

Childhood

The son of Carrie Langston Hughes (a teacher) and her husband, James Nathaniel Hughes, Langston Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes is of both African American and Native American descent. After abandoning his family and the later legal dissolution of the marriage, James Hughes left for Cuba, then Mexico, in the United States. After the separation of his parents, young Langston was raised mainly by his grandmother, Mary Langston, as his mother sought employment. Through the black American oral tradition of storytelling, she would instill in the young Langston Hughes a sense of lasting racial pride. He spent most of childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. Due to an unstable early life, his childhood was not an entirely happy one, but it was one that heavily influenced the poet he would become. Later, he lived again with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, who had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school.

While in grammar school in Lincoln, Illinois, he was designated class poet. Hughes stated in retrospect that this was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm. "I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows — except us — that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet. During high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, When Sue Wears Red, was written while he was still in high school. It was during this time that he discovered his love of books. From this early period in his life, Hughes would cite as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg.

Relationship with father and Columbia

Hughes spent a brief period of time with his father in Mexico in 1919. The relationship between Langston and his father was troubled, causing Hughes a degree of dissatisfaction that led him to contemplate suicide at least once. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to live with his father, hoping to convince him to provide money to attend Columbia University. Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico again:

I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.

Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son. James Hughes did not support his son's desire to be a writer. Eventually, Langston and his father came to a compromise. Langston would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided, Hughes left his father after more than a year of living with him. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice within the institution, and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.

Adulthood

Hughes worked various odd jobs, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris.

Unlike specific writers of the post-World War I era who became identified as the "Lost Generation", such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hughes instead spent time in Paris during the early 1920s, becoming part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, Hughes returned to the U. S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. Hughes again found work doing various odd jobs before gaining white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the scholar Carter G. Woodson within the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Not satisfied with the demands of the work and time constraints this position placed on the hours he spent writing, Hughes quit this job for one as a busboy in a hotel. It was while working as a busboy that Hughes would encounter the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet, though by this time, Hughes' earlier work had already been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.

The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, an HBCU in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the first black fraternal organization founded at a historically black college and university. Thurgood Marshall, who later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was an alumnus and classmate of Langston Hughes during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University.

Hughes received a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929 and a Litt.D. in 1943 from Lincoln. A second honorary doctorate would be awarded to him in 1963 by Howard University, another HBCU. Except for travels that included parts of the Caribbean, Harlem was Hughes’s primary home for the remainder of his life.

Academics and biographers today acknowledge that Hughes was a homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman, whose work Hughes cited as another influence on his poetry, and most patently in the short story Blessed Assurance which deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and queerness. It has been noted that to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted. Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African American men in his work and life. This love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to a black male lover.

Death

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer leading to the auditorium named for him within the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The design on the floor covering his cremated remains is an African cosmogram titled Rivers. The title is taken from the poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Hughes. Within the center of the cosmogram and precisely above the ashes of Hughes are the words My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Many of Hughes' papers reside at his alma mater in the Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University, as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 1981, Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and 127th St. was renamed Langston Hughes Place. On February 1, 2002, The United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps to commemorate both the centennial of Hughes' birth and the 25th anniversary of the Black Heritage series.

Career

1920s

First published in The Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes's signature poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, appeared in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues in 1926:

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas, who, collectively, (with the exception of McKay), created the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists.

Hughes and his contemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class, and of those considered to be the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, whom they accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating Eurocentric values and culture for social equality. A primary expression of this conflict was the former's depiction of the "low-life", that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for him and his contemporaries published in The Nation in 1926, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express

our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.

If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,

it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.

The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people

are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure

doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,

strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain

free within ourselves.

Hughes was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé, and he didn’t go much beyond the themes of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people who he judged himself the adequate appreciator of and whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience. Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind, Hughes is quoted as saying. Therefore, in his work he confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality. An expression of this is the poem My People:

The night is beautiful,

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

So the eyes of my people

Beautiful, also, is the sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Moreover, Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism absent of self-hate that united people of African descent and Africa across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, such as Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. With Senghor and Césaire and other French-speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean like René Maran from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the concept that became the Négritude movement in France where a radical black self-examination was emphasized in the face of European colonialism. Langston Hughes was not only a role model for his calls for black racial pride instead of assimilation, but the most important technical influence in his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

1930s

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy whose family must deal with a variety of struggles imposed upon them due to their race and class in society in addition to relating to one another. Hughes first collection of short stories came in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. These stories provided a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, these stories are marked by a general pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. In 1938, Hughes would establish the Harlem Suitcase Theater followed by the New Negro Theater in 1939 in Los Angeles, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941.

1940s

The same year Hughes established his theatre troupe in Los Angeles, his ambition to write for the movies materialized when he co-wrote the screenplay for Way Down South. Further hopes by Hughes to write for the lucrative movie trade were thwarted because of racial discrimination within the industry. Through the black publication Chicago Defender, Hughes in 1943 gave creative birth to Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled Simple, the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. He was offered to teach at a number of colleges, but seldom did. In 1947, Hughes taught a semester at the predominantly black Atlanta University. Hughes, in 1949, spent three months at the integrated University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a "Visiting Lecturer on Poetry." He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, works for children, and, with the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English.

1950s and 1960s

Much of his writing was inspired by the rhythms and language of the black church, and, the blues and jazz of that era, the music he believed to be the true expression of the black spirit; an example is "Harlem" (sometimes called "Dream Deferred") from Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), from which a line was taken for the title of the play A Raisin in the Sun.

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?

During the mid-1950s and -1960s, Hughes' popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist. He in turn found a number of writers like James Baldwin lacking in this same pride, over intellectualizing in their work, and occasionally vulgar.

Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not scorn or to flee it. He understood the main points of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes' posthumously published Panther and the Lash in 1967 was intended to show solidarity and understanding with these writers but with more skill and absent of the most virile anger and terse racial chauvinism some showed toward whites. Hughes still continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers who he often helped by offering advice to and introducing to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, who happened to include Alice Walker who Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated in degrees and tones within their own work. One of these young black writers observed of Hughes, "Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us."

Recognition

In 1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American. Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. In 1973, the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York.

Political views

Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a ½ segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem A New Song:

I speak in the name of the black millions

Awakening to action.

Let all others keep silent a moment

I have this word to bring,

This thing to say,

This song to sing:

Bitter was the day

When I bowed my back

Beneath the slaver's whip.

That day is past.

Bitter was the day

When I saw my children unschooled,

My young men without a voice in the world,

My women taken as the body-toys

Of a thieving people.

That day is past.

Bitter was the day, I say,

When the lyncher's rope

Hung about my neck,

And the fire scorched my feet,

And the oppressors had no pity,

And only in the sorrow songs

Relief was found.

That day is past.

I know full well now

Only my own hands,

Dark as the earth,

Can make my earth-dark body free.

O thieves, exploiters, killers,

No longer shall you say

With arrogant eyes and scornful lips:

"You are my servant,

Black man-

I, the free!"

That day is past-

For now,

In many mouths-

Dark mouths where red tongues burn

And white teeth gleam-

New words are formed,

Bitter

With the past

But sweet

With the dream.

Tense,

Unyielding,

Strongand sure,

They sweep the earth-

Revolt! Arise!

The Black

And White World

Shall be one!

The Worker's World!

The past is done!

A new dream flames

Against the

Sun!

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of disparate blacks who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of most blacks living in the United States at the time. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian polymath Arthur Koestler. Hughes would also manage to travel to China and Japan before returning home to the States.

Hughes' poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes travelled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African American newspapers. Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, even though he was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II. Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the irony of U.S. Jim Crow laws existing at the same time a war was being fought against Fascism and the Axis powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after coming to understand that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously supported him on the Radical Left. Over time, Hughes would distance himself from his most radical poems. In 1959 came the publication of his Selected Poems. Absent from this group of poems was his most controversial work.

Hughes was a longtime resident of Westfield, New Jersey.

Visual media

In visual media, Hughes' sexuality was the subject of two plays by African American playwrights: Hannibal of the Alps by Michael Dinwiddie and Paper Armor by Eisa Davis. In the 1989 film, Looking for Langston by British filmmaker Isaac Julien, Hughes is reclaimed as a black gay icon — reclamation Julien saw as necessary because Hughes' sexuality has historically been ignored or downplayed. Hughes' iconic status in African American literature is contingent on his heterosexuality.

In the theatrical film Get on the Bus, directed by Spike Lee, a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character while commenting, "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

Also in visual media, the diminutive Hughes was portrayed in the 2004 film Brother to Brother by actor Daniel Sunjata. Prior to this film, in 2003, Hughes was portrayed as a teenager by actor Gary LeRoi Gray in the short film Salvation that was based on a portion of his autobiography the Big Sea.

Regarding documentary film, the New York Center for Visual History included Langston Hughes as part of its Voices & Visions series of notable writers. Hughes' Dream Harlem by producer and director Jamal Joseph and distributed through California Newsreel is another such film where Hughes' steadfast racial pride and artistic independence is discussed.

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Weary Blues. Knopf, 1926
• . Knopf, 1927
• The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
• Dear Lovely Death, 1931
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. Knopf, 1932
• Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play. N.Y.: Golden Stair Press, 1932
• Shakespeare in Harlem. Knopf, 1942
• Freedom's Plow. 1943
• Fields of Wonder. Knopf,1947
• One-Way Ticket. 1949
• Montage of a Dream Deferred. Holt, 1951
• Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. 1958
• Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Hill & Wang, 1961
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Knopf, 1994
• Let America Be America Again 2005

Fiction

• Not Without Laughter. Knopf, 1930
• The Ways of White Folks. Knopf, 1934
• Simple Speaks His Mind. 1950
• Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952
• Simple Takes a Wife. 1953
• Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955
• Simple Stakes a Claim. 1957
• Tambourines to Glory (book), 1958
• The Best of Simple. 1961
• Simple's Uncle Sam. 1965
• Something in Common and Other Stories. Hill & Wang, 1963
• Short Stories of Langston Hughes. Hill & Wang, 1996

Non-fiction

• The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940
• Famous American Negroes. 1954
• Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer. 1954
• I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, with Milton Meltzer. 1956
• Famous Negro Heroes of America. 1958
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. 1962

Major plays

• Mule Bone, with Zora Neale Hurston. 1931
• Mulatto. 1935 (renamed The Barrier, an opera, in 1950)
• Troubled Island, with William Grant Still. 1936
• Little Ham. 1936
• Emperor of Haiti. 1936
• Don't You Want to be Free? 1938
• Street Scene, contributed lyrics. 1947
• Tambourines to glory. 1956
• Simply Heavenly. 1957
• Black Nativity. 1961
• Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
• Jericho-Jim Crow. 1964

Works for children

• Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps. 1932
• The First Book of the Negroes. 1952
• The First Book of Jazz. 1954
• The First Book of Rhythms. 1954
• The First Book of the West Indies. 1956
• First Book of Africa. 1964

Other

• The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1958.
• Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes. Lawrence Hill, 1973.
• The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Notes

I Too Sing America

References

See also

• Harlem Renaissance
• African American literature
• Pan-Africanism
• Négritude

External links

• Poems by Langston Hughes at PoetryFoundation.org
• The Collected Works of Langston Hughes
• Langston Hughes on Poets.org With poems, related essays, and links, from the Academy of American Poets
• A Centennial Tribute to L. Hughes at Howard University
• Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto
• A selection of Langston Hughes's more political poetry
• 1988 audio interview of Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes. Interview by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
• Langston Hughes Elementary School, Lawrence, KS, including photos and texts of the writer
• Smithsonian "The Music in Poetry: Langston Hughes & His use of the Blues"
• Langston Hughes & His Poetry, Library of Congress
• The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Ford Foundation Report
• The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes
• Beinecke Library,Yale University, Langston Hughes at 100
• Langston Hughes in Lawrence, KS: Photographs & Biographical Resources
• An Analization of Langston Hughes
• Phat African American Poetry Book
• Sweet Flypaper of Life with Roy DeCarava
• Langston Hughes -- "Dream Deferred,"Clip from the Langston Hughes program the Voices & Visions video
• Langston Hughes Papers on deposit at Yale
• America's Library, Library of Congress, Langston Hughes
• I Hear America Singing, PBS.ORG
• Obituary of Langston Hughes, The New York Times
• Atrium where the ashes of Langston Hughes reside in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem
• List of previewable works on Google Book Search by and concerning Langston Hughes
• "My Adventures as a Social Poet" by Langston Hughes on NegroArtist.com
• Langston Hughes FBI File