Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues and jazz

into words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet, novelist, journalist, and

playwright.

Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was

brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband

(Hughes's grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social

justice.

As a lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while

in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University, but left after an

unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe,

a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis

(NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to

combine the traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.

As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the

movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and

Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly because of the depression Hughes became a socialist in

the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he wrote many radical poems and essays in

magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year in the Soviet Union.

In 1939 Hughes moved away from the political scene. During the war he supported the

Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a collection of poems Shakespeare in

Harlem (1942). He attacked segregation, especially in his column in t...

... middle of paper ...

...be a black person in his time. He used his Poetry in sense to speak out against racism. African American Voices.Conneticutt:The Millbrook Press, 1995

Adventures in American Literature. Chicago: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980

Langston Hughes. We Too Sing America. G. Casey Cassidy.Online. Yale New Haven Teachers

Institute. 1998

Langston Hughes. The Influence of Musical Folk Traditions in the Poetry of Langston Hughes

and Nicolás Guill. Kathryn Gray.online. Yale New Haven Teachers Institute.1998

Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes.online. Biography Online.1997

Langston Hughes.Hughes Life and Career .Arnold Rampersad.online. Oxford University Press.

1997

The New Modern American and British Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939

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