Langston Hughes
was an African American poet, novelist, and
playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial
relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E. B.
Du Bois, and Walt Whitman, Hughes depicted realistically the ordinary
lives of black people. Many of his poems, written in rhythmical
language, have been set to music. Hughes's poems were meant 'to be read
aloud, crooned, shouted and sung'.
Langston Hughes was born on
Febuary 1,
1902 in Joplin
Missouri,
James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. His
mother was a school teacher, she also wrote poetry. His father,
James Nathaniel Hughes, was a storekeeper. He had wanted to become a
lawyer, but he had been denied to take the bar exam. He was
the
great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer
Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public
office, in
1855. Hughes's grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary
Langston, was prominent in the African American community in Lawrence,
Kansas.
Her first husband had died at Harper's Ferry fighting with John Brown;
her
second husband, Langston Hughes's grandfather, was a prominent Kansas
politician during Reconstruction. During the time Hughes lived with his
grandmother, however, she was old, poor, and unable to give Hughes the
attention he needed. At the age of 13 he moved back with his
mother and her
second husband.
Hughes'
life and work were enormously influential for the Harlem Renaissance
of the '20s. His poetry and fiction centered on the lives of blacks in America,
lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Much
of
Hughes' poetry tries to capture the rhythms of blues music, the music
he
believed to be the true expression of the black spirit. His published
works
through 1965 including nine volumes of poetry, eight of short stories
and
sketches, two novels, seven children's books, a number of plays,
essays, and
translations, and a two-volume autobiography. He received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1935. Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of
Arts and
Letters in 1961. Later the family moved to Cleveland,
Ohio, where Hughes's stepfather
worked in
the steel mills. During this period Hughes found the poems of Carl
Sandbury,
whose unrhymed free verse influenced him deeply.
Hughes attended Central High
School in Cleveland, Ohio,
but began
writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class
Poet. He became friends with some white classmates, yet he also
suffered racial
insult at the hands of other whites. He learned first-hand to
distinguish
"decent" from "reactionary" white folks, distinctions he
would reiterate in his book Not
Without Laughter and in his
"Here
to Yonder" columns in The
Chicago Defender. Seeking
some
consolation and continuity in the midst of the myriad relocations of
his youth,
he grew to love books. His love of reading developed into a desire to
write as
he sought to replicate the powerful impact other writers from many
cultures had
made upon him. In his writing, Hughes accomplished an important feat.
While
others wallowed in self-revelation as a balm for their loneliness,
Hughes often
transformed his own agonies into the sufferings endured by the
collective race
and sometimes all of humankind.
After graduating from Central High School in Cleveland in 1920, he
moved to Mexico City to live with his father for one year. His mother
fumed about his departure, and his father offered him little
warmth. His
father did
not think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged
him to
pursue a more practical career. He paid his son's tuition to Columbia University on the
grounds he study engineering. Hughes soon abandoned his studies, after
a short time, Langston dropped out
of the
program with a B+ average; all the while, he continued writing poetry.
and participated in
more entertaining jazz and blues activities in nearby Harlem.
Disgusted with life at the university and to see the world, he enlisted
as a
steward on a freighter bound to West Africa. He
traveled
to Paris, worked as a door
attendant and a bouncer of a nightclub, and continued to Italy.
His devotion to black music led him to novel fusions of jazz and
blues with
traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues (1926)
and Fine
Clothes to the Jew (1927).
His emphasis on lower-class black life,
especially in the latter, led to harsh attacks on him in the black
press. With
these books, however, he established himself as a major force of the
Harlem
Renaissance. In 1926, in the Nation, he provided the
movement
with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride
and
artistic independence in his most memorable essay, 'The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain."
By this time, Hughes had enrolled
at the historically black Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania,
from which he would graduate in 1929. In 1927, he began one of the most
important
relationships of his life, with his patron Mrs. Charlotte Mason, or
"Godmother," who generously supported him for two years. She
supervised the writing of his first novel, Not without Laughter (1930)--about
a sensitive, black Midwestern boy and his struggling family. However,
their
relationship collapsed about the time the novel appeared, and Hughes
sank into
a period of intense personal unhappiness and disillusionment.
Langston
Hughes never married, although he fell in love many times. He once got
a
proposal from a young woman named Anne Coussey, but he thought marriage
would
get in the way of his poetry. Whenever Langston couldn't think of a
good poem,
he would travel. He ended up traveling all the way around the country!
He usually got to places by working on the boat that brought him
there.
Before he became famous for his poetry, working on a boat was not the
only low
paying job he had. Another of his occupations was working as a busboy
at the
Wardman Park Hotel.
Many on the political right accused
Hughes of being a Communist, 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." He was called before the House
Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Following his appearance, he
distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some
who had
previously supported him on the Radical Left.
He
died at sixty-five in New York,
having left instructions for his mourners to dress
in red, "Cause there ain’t no sense in my being dead." At his
memorial service a pianist played Duke Ellington’s "Do Nothin’ Till You
Hear from Me," one of the poet’s favorite songs. Twenty-four years
later,
in 1991, his ashes were interred beneath the floor of an auditorium
named in his
honor at the Shaumburg Center
for Research in Black Culture in his beloved Harlem,
the "great dark city."
Langston Hughes is known for the following quotes:
- "Never look for a worm in the apple of your eye."
- "No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any
more that she can be witty by only the help of speech."
- "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a
raisin in the sun? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it
explode?
- "Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and
cool the earth, the air and you."
- "Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with
silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby."
Major
portions of the above text were directly copied from public domain
documents found on the internet.
I have listed those Internet
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