Langston Hughes

Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes was for several decades the most popular Black American writer in the U.S. He died on May 22, 1967, in New York City. His words still resonated with readers long after his death.

One of the most talented and prolific writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Langston Hughes enjoyed a long and successful career as a poet and author of short stories, novels, magazine and newspaper articles, plays, and numerous other works. His respect for the lives of "plain Black people" resonated throughout everything he produced, as did his gentle, folksy humor and compassion tinged with sorrow. Early in his career, he endured criticism from those who felt he betrayed his race by portraying the less attractive aspects of Black-American life; later, he was rejected by a younger and more militant generation of Black-American writers for his reluctance to display bitterness or take a strong political stand in his writings. Through it all, Hughes remained true to his own vision of a world where most people were basically good and the future still offered hope that all races would one day live together in harmony and understanding.

Early Life and Writing

A native of Joplin, Missouri, who spent most of his youth in Lawrence Kansas, James Langston Hughes was the only child of James and Carrie Langston Hughes. James Hughes deserted his wife before Langston was born and moved to Mexico to seek his fortune; he did not even meet his son until the child was five years old. While Carrie Hughes went from city to city searching for work, first her mother, Mary Langston, and then some family friends, James and Mary Reed, raised young Langston. In 1915, he joined his mother and her second husband in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school. An excellent student, he wrote verses for the school magazine in a style similar to that of his favorite poets, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, but incorporating Black-American dialects, words, and rhythms.

Career as a Poet

After graduating from high school, Hughes turned to his long-absent father for financial help so that he could attend New York City's Columbia University and become a poet. The elder Hughes scoffed at the notion of a Black man studying anything so impractical and refused to help unless Langston agreed to study engineering instead. After a brief stint as a teacher in Mexico (during which time he also contributed his first material to NAACP publications, including Crisis and Brownies' Book, a magazine for children), the young man finally agreed to his father's conditions and enrolled at Columbia in the fall of 1921. But Hughes soon grew bored with his classes and dropped out of school after spring term in 1922 to spend more time with members of the NAACP staff and others who were part of the "Harlem Renaissance," a growing Black-American intellectual and artistic movement.

Supporting himself by doing odd jobs, Hughes soaked up life in Harlem and its environs during this exciting period and published poems on a steady basis, including "The Weary Blues," a brilliant piece that perfectly captured the sounds and rhythms of street talk and music. He also traveled to Africa and Europe, working his way across the Atlantic on board various freighters. (He reported on his experiences in Africa in a popular series of articles written for Crisis.) In early 1924, on his third trip overseas, Hughes quit his job and headed for Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in a nightclub and managed to save enough money to travel to Spain and Italy before returning to New York in November, 1924.

In early 1925, Hughes moved to Washington, D.C., with hopes of attending Howard University. Denied a scholarship, he instead worked at a series of menial, low-paying jobs. Then his luck suddenly began to change. Around mid-year, "The Weary Blues" won an award and attracted the attention of writer and critic Carl Van Vechten, a prominent supporter of Black-American authors and artists, who used his influence to have some of Hughes's poems published in Vanity Fair magazine. Van Vechten also persuaded his own publisher, Knopf, to bring out an edition of the young poet's works. Its publication in January, 1926 (under the title The Weary Blues), coincided with poet Vachel Lindsay's "discovery" of Hughes. While working as a busboy in a New York City hotel where Lindsay was dining before giving a reading, Hughes slipped him a few of his own pieces, which Lindsay then shared with his audience as the work of a promising young Black-American poet. The exposure quickly made Hughes a celebrity and launched his career as a writer.

With royalties from The Weary Blues, payments for various magazine articles, and some prize money, plus financial help from Amy Spingarn, a member of a wealthy family that contributed generously to the NAACP and other Black-American organizations, Hughes was at last able to attend college. He chose Lincoln University, an all-Black school near Philadelphia. Between the time he enrolled in February, 1926, and his graduation in 1929, Hughes spent most of his free time writing. In 1927, Knopf brought out another collection of his poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew, an earthy and unsentimental look at life among those at the bottom of society--prostitutes, alcoholics, and the miserably poor. Although the book was a success with literary magazines and the White press, middle-class Black-American intellectuals condemned it as trash and attacked Hughes for perpetuating negative views of Black people.

During the 1930s, Hughes periodically experienced spiritual crises and creative slumps, which seriously affected the quality and quantity of his work. His antidote was often travel, which not only revitalized him but afforded him the opportunity to do research and reach "his people" through poetry readings. Over the course of the decade, he visited Cuba several times (where he met and became lifelong friends with many young writers), Haiti, the Soviet Union, Japan, China, Mexico, and Europe and toured throughout the southern and western United States. When he was able to write, he produced numerous poems, articles, and other works, including a much-praised semiautobiographical novel, Not Without Laughter; a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks; a Broadway play, Mulatto; and an autobiography, The Big Sea.

The 1930s also saw the awakening of Hughes's political radicalism as he observed the effects of the Depression during his travels. Like so many artists and intellectuals of his era, he was particularly impressed by the Soviet Union and regarded it as a symbol of hope and a model of action. While he was never officially a member of the American Communist party, he did become affiliated with various other left-wing groups, causes, and publications. Gradually, some of his writings took on a more radical tone, which made them difficult to sell to mainstream publishers in the United States. Finally, following a visit to Spain during which he reported on the civil war there for the Associated Press, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals, Hughes came to the realization that he could not be quite as militant as he had been if he expected to be able to earn a living as a writer.

Returning to the United States in 1938, Hughes at first focused on writing and producing plays for the Harlem Suitcase Theater. He then served a brief stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood but found the experience humiliating because he was expected to adhere to the racial stereotypes then common in films. After completing The Big Sea, Hughes went back to writing poetry and short stories. Although he was still committed to social justice and racial equality, he toned down his radicalism and opted for a gentler approach incorporating humor and irony. His principal mouthpiece was Jesse B. Semple (also known as just "Simple"), a character who debuted in 1943 in a series of extremely popular short stories that appeared over a twenty-three-year period, first in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in four separate book collections. A sort of barfly philosopher who shares his troubles with a writer in exchange for a drink, the folksy Simple does not directly challenge racism yet clearly illustrates the difficulties a poor Black man faces in a racist society and the quiet determination necessary to overcome those difficulties.

Later Career and Legacy

By the end of the 1940s, more and more Americans were coming to recognize Hughes as one of the country's major writers. In the early 1950s, however, his radical past came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which ordered him to explain his ties to the Communist party. At his hearing, he admitted to his past associations but, unlike many others who were called before the committee, he was not asked to name his fellow "subversives." Despite this rather lenient treatment, Hughes nevertheless felt the impact of the investigation on his career as some groups picketed his lectures and reading tours or canceled them altogether. He was able to continue writing, however, publishing Montage of a Dream Deferred, an ambitious series of poems describing a day and a night in Harlem; I Wonder As I Wander, the second volume of his autobiography; and Selected Poems, a collection he assembled himself that omitted many of his more politically radical pieces.

During the last decade of his life, Hughes continued to write, focusing mainly on plays that proved commercially unsuccessful. He also reviewed the fiction of younger Black-American authors and toured Africa and Europe on behalf of the U.S. State Department as a cultural ambassador. In early 1967, his health began to fail, and on May 22 of that year, he died of uremia.

Although he was often called the poet laureate of his people, Langston Hughes nevertheless endured the criticism of many of his fellow Black Americans for displaying a lack of "responsibility" in his writing. Yet he enjoyed the unconditional love and acceptance of those whose lives he knew best--the "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago--people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter--and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

The words and ideals of Langston Hughes lived on, well into the twenty-first century, as readers continue to seek his vision of harmony and cooperation in a world still tense with racial conflict. People have honored Hughes in many ways, including naming schools after him and featuring him on a postage stamp (2002) and a Google Doodle (2015).