A Chronology of the Life of Langston Hughes
1902 Born James Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri; Langston is raised by his
Grandmother, Mary Langston, while Mom (Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes) seeks work on the road
and Dad (James Nathaniel Hughes) lives in Mexico City.
1916 Hughes is named class poet of his (graduating) eighth grade class, and enters
Central High in Cleveland, Ohio after rejoining Mom and her 2nd husband, Homer Clark.
1920 Writing in the school magazine, Hughes’s work shows the influence of Walt
Whitman and Carl Sandburg—the latter had published “Jazz Fantasies” in 1919; Hughes graduates
as class poet and lives with his disapproving father in Mexico.
1921 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is published in The Crisis, the magazine of the organization
founded by the intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois that would later become the NAACP. “Supported” by
Dad, he enrolls at Columbia University. He meets Du Bois and Countee Cullen.
1922-24 Hughes withdraws from Columbia; after writing “The Weary Blues,” he ships
out for Africa in 1923, and works briefly in the kitchen of Le Grand Duc in Paris in 1924.
He writes jazz poems; he writes “I,Too” while stranded in Genoa.
1925 “The Weary Blues” wins a contest, and Hughes wins a contract with Alfred A. Knopf, as
well as publication in Vanity Fair. He meets Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn
Brooks, and other luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance; working as a busboy, he slips a couple of
poems to poet Vachel Lindsey, and tells others how much Lindsey likes his work.
1926 The Weary Blues is published; Hughes publishes his landmark essay, “The Negro Artist
And the Racial Mountain” in The Nation.
1927-30 Hughes meets the wealthy, aged Charlotte Mason, who becomes his patron; he graduates
from Lincoln University and publishes his first novel.
1930-31 Mrs. Mason breaks with Hughes; distraught, he visits Haiti and makes a major
ideological shift to the Left, publishing poems and articles in New Masses. He visits with the
Scottsboro boys and labors in their defense, working against the NAACP.
1931
The Dream Keeper, a book of poetry for young readers, is published.
1932
Hughes writes “Goodbye Christ” and “Hello Revolution”; he visits the USSR, first to
make a film, and then simply to travel the vast nation.
1937 Hughes travels to Spain to cover the Civil War for several Afro-American newspapers. He
translates Lorca and meets W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, Berthold Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, and
other famous writers. He suffers through the bombing of Madrid.
1938-39 Returns to the US to found a leftist theater group; his mother dies. Hughes heads to
California, where he writes Way Down South for Hollywood, and is promptly accused of selling out.
1939-40 Picketed by evangelicals in Pasadena for having written “Goodbye Christ” in 1932,
Hughes publically repudiates the poem, and is promptly attacked by the Communist press.
1940-49 Hughes writes stories (including the Simple stories), songs, newspaper columns,
anthologies, plays, operas, screenplays, translations, essays, and, yes, poetry throughout the decade;
the FBI begins investigating his Communist activities in 1940.
1953 Called to appear before Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee on subversive activities, Hughes
concedes his own involvement with the Left but names no other names. He is exonerated, but he is
shaken by the experience.
1956 Hughes becomes inspired to write a gospel musical, (a form of writing he invented!)
that he later converts into a novel.
1960 Hughes wins the NAACP’s highest award, the Springarn Medal, beginning a period of travel
abroad as a performer, lecturer, and cultural ambassador to Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, and
fervent civil-rights work at home in the US between international performances.
1964
Hughes publically defends Harlem in the media during the terrible riots.
1965 Hughes attacks Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and other young militant black poets in an article
called “That Boy Leroi,” decrying the use of obscenity and profanity; he defends Martin Luther
King, Jr., against more militant black intellectuals.
1966 Hughes travels to Dakar, Senegal, to the First World Festival of Negro Arts, after being
appointed by the President. He speaks on “Black Writers in a Troubled World,” about racial
chauvinism and obscenity in contemporary black American writing. He meets Haile Selassie.
1967 Hughes publishes The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: an anthology from 1899 to the
Present that includes a story by a 21-year-old writer named Alice Walker. He dies in May.