Hughes, Langston
Sex: Male
Born: Joplin, Missouri, United States
01 February 1902
Died: New York, New York, United States
22 May 1967
Activity/Profession: Poet
(b. 1 February 1902; d. 22 May 1967),
poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, columnist, and cultural leader.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was the preeminent African American poet of the twentieth
century, but he wrote in almost every literary genre during his five-decade career. He was born in
Joplin, Missouri, but spent his childhood years in Lawrence, Kansas, with his maternal
grandmother, Mary Langston, while his mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, a teacher, looked for
employment and marital stability elsewhere. Soon after Langston's birth in 1902, his parents
separated. His father, James Hughes, embittered by racist experiences in the United States, left
for Mexico, where he owned a ranch, practiced law, and collected rent from tenement houses he
owned. After his grandmother died, Langston lived for two years with family friends, James and
Mary Reed.
As an artist Hughes saw life and art as closely intertwined, and there appears to be an intimate, if
sometimes inverse, relationship between Hughes's own family history and his commitments as
an artist and opinion maker. Having grown up as a lonely child with frequently changing
circumstances, attending adults, and locations (including Illinois and Ohio with his mother and
stepfather), Hughes developed a strong link to African Americans as a whole and to their
historical experience. In many of his poems, including his first published poem “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers” (1921), he spoke in the collective voice of all African Americans in powerful
ways rarely matched in literature. But certainly there was much in his distinguished family
history to inspire him, too. Mary Langston (b. 1836) especially instilled in her young and curious
grandson the kind of racial pride and courage that her two husbands—Lewis Sheridan Leary and
Charles Langston—had displayed in their lives. Hughes rejected his own father's bitterness to
form a strong commitment to working for the many causes that touched black American lives.
Langston Hughes. In Paris, France, 1938.
New York World–Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress
view larger image
Hughes attended schools in Kansas and Illinois and graduated from high school in 1919 in
Cleveland, Ohio. His mother often fought successfully to get him into decent schools in white
neighborhoods, and he was generally liked and respected by his classmates. He began writing
poetry as a high school student, inspired by the writings of Carl Sandburg and Paul Laurence
Dunbar. After high school he spent a year in Mexico with his father and then enrolled at
Columbia University as an engineering student. Hughes spent only one year at Columbia. By
then he knew that he wanted to be a writer and had already published a few poems in The Crisis
and in The Brownies’ Book, both edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Leaving New York in 1923,
Hughes signed up as a crewman on a freighter, SS Malone, making it possible for him to live for
six months in West Africa and Europe. In 1924 he lived in Paris and worked as kitchen help in a
restaurant for a few months. Later that year he lived with his mother in Washington, D.C.,
working for some time as a personal assistant to Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History. While working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the
District of Columbia, he had an opportunity to show a few of his poems to the poet Vachel
Lindsay, who was quite impressed and brought Hughes some welcome publicity.
By early 1926 Hughes was dividing his time between Harlem and Lincoln University, a
historically black college in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he was enrolled as an
undergraduate. His classmates at Lincoln included the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood
Marshall, the future president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, and the musician Cab Calloway. For
most of his life Hughes made his home in Harlem, where he died of complications arising from
abdominal surgery to deal with prostate cancer. By the time he died, he had authored or edited
forty-seven books. He was the first African American writer to support himself successfully from
his income as a writer. He was also the first American poet to embrace jazz and blues in his
writing. He received numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935
and the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1960, as well as honorary degrees from Lincoln and
Howard universities. He was also elected a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Throughout his life Hughes helped and inspired fellow artists around the globe, and his own
work was translated into many languages. Fluent in Spanish, he formed a close bond with many
Spanish-language poets, translating the poetry of writers such as Nicolás Guillén, Frederico
García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. Writers who acknowledged his influence on their writing
and style include Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques Roumain. In 1981
Hughes's home in Harlem, 20 East 127th Street, was given landmark status, and the block was
renamed “Langston Hughes Place.” In 1973 the City College of the City University of New York
started awarding an annual Langston Hughes Medal. In the early 1940s Hughes began gifting his
papers to the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library at Yale University. Some of his papers are also on deposit at the Langston Hughes
Memorial Library at his alma mater, Lincoln University.
The Harlem Renaissance and the Fire!! Rebels.
In the mid-1920s Hughes kept company with other young writers and artists, and they met
frequently at the Harlem quarters of Wallace Thurman, who had arrived in Harlem from Salt
Lake City and Los Angeles on Labor Day 1925. Hughes admired Thurman's critical acumen and
turned to him often for feedback on his writing. Along with Zora Neale Hurston, John P. Davis,
Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, Eric Walrond, Helene Johnson, Dorothy West, and others,
Hughes and Thurman formed a literary group centered on the short-lived literary magazine
Fire!! Together and individually they challenged the didacticism of public figures such as Du
Bois, even as they maintained significant critical distance from the mentoring and promotional
ways of cultural pluralists such as Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson. Although in essays and
reviews such as “Nephews of Uncle Remus” and “High, Low, Past, and Present” Thurman
claimed a distinctive voice as an early theorist and public intellectual that goes well beyond the
ideas articulated in Hughes's famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1925),
Hughes spoke most resonantly and memorably for his Harlem Renaissance peers when he stated
in that essay:
"We 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 and his colleagues recognized that “the Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp
criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites.”
So they felt compelled to engage both the black bourgeoisie and the white critics in debates
regarding issues of aesthetics and representation. They recognized that their need to reject
pressures from both these groups impinged in one way or another upon their individuality as well
as their freedom as artists. All of the younger artists associated with Fire!!, as well as a few
others, opposed the programmatic and promotional ideologies of the older generation of black
writers, leaders, and intellectuals such as Du Bois, Allison Davis, Aubrey Bowser, and Benjamin
Brawley. But because—like Ralph Waldo Emerson during the American renaissance—Du Bois
was a towering presence during the peak years of the Harlem Renaissance, he was often their
favorite target. By wrestling courageously in the 1920s and 1930s with the intricacies of racial
constructions in the United States, Hughes and others surely facilitated the process by which
future generations of African American writers developed a much more complicated
understanding of issues surrounding art, representation, and group identity.
Although Hughes shared the Fire!! group's desire for assertive independence, he was more
invested as an artist than, say, Thurman or Hurston in exploring themes of racial pride and racial
exclusion in the rhythms of common black speech, using a folksy style that combined humor,
wit, and irony. He was also arguably the most skillful among the younger Harlem Renaissance
artists in navigating the troubled waters of racial and representational politics during these years.
Never losing sight of his own goals as a budding writer, he was careful to develop literary
connections and friendships that helped his career. In 1925 he won a literary competition
sponsored by Opportunity magazine, edited by the sociologist Charles S. Johnson for the
National Urban League. Around this time Hughes also met Carl Van Vechten, a white jazz critic
and writer who had a penchant for interracial cultural interaction. Van Vechten arranged the
publication of Hughes's book of poems The Weary Blues (1926), which has all of Hughes's
signature themes as a “social poet” (Hughes's own term).
In 1927, through Locke, Hughes met Charlotte Quick Osgood Mason, a rich white woman who
had developed an interest in African art, which she believed could help American blacks regain
their lost self-respect. For two years, from 1928 to 1930, Mason supported Hughes most
generously, and he completed his only novel, Not without Laughter (1930), a bildungsroman that
captures the diverse details of African American life and culture surrounding the young hero
Sandy's conflicts centered in class and lifestyle. The breakup with Mason was quite traumatic for
Hughes and propelled him toward a mistrust of capitalism that was certainly in the air in the
wake of the Wall Street crash in 1929.
From Revolution to McCarthyism.
The modest commercial success of Not without Laughter opened up some new opportunities for
Hughes. In 1931, following Mary McLeod Bethune's advice, he began a poetry reading and
lecture tour in the South, and in 1932 he made a trip to the Soviet Union along with Louise
Thompson and others with the goal of making a film there that would portray the living
conditions of black Americans at that time. The film never materialized, but Hughes traveled
extensively in the Soviet Union and also visited China and Japan on his trip home. During the
1930s he wrote many revolutionary poems that were published in the newspaper of the
Communist Party USA. He also supported the party's campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys and
traveled in 1937 to Spain to report on the Spanish civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American. He
was involved for a while in the John Reed Club and other leftist activities.
In 1934 Hughes published Ways of White Folks, his first collection of short stories, which
included “The Blues I'm Playing,” an intricate fictional treatment of his relationship with Mason.
As part of his activism he focused on the theater in the late 1930s, establishing the Harlem
Suitcase Theater (1938), the New Negro Theater in Los Angeles (1939), and the Skyloft Theater
in Chicago (1941). In 1941 he also cowrote the screenplay for Way down South, but he was
unsuccessful in getting more work in Hollywood because of rampant racism in the industry.
However, his success as a playwright gave him a measure of financial stability that allowed him
to buy his Harlem home.
In 1943 Hughes started writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender regarding a folksy
character in Harlem named Jess B. Semple (Just Be Simple), who offered his witty opinions on
black life and culture for well over two decades. Hughes's newspaper columns continued until
1965 when the last of the five books of Simple tales appeared. In 1940 he published The Big Sea,
the first of two autobiographies, which includes his charming and influential narrative of the
Harlem Renaissance years. Its commercial possibilities were overwhelmed by the appearance of
Richard Wright's Native Son in the same year. Hughes's second autobiography, I Wonder as I
Wander, wherein he wrote freely about his year in the Soviet Union, appeared in 1956. During
World War II, Hughes wrote jingles and newspaper columns to encourage the sale of war bonds
and participated actively in the Double V campaign of the black press.
Some of Hughes's leftist associations and writings during the 1930s came to haunt him in the
1950s. He was accused of being a Communist, but he always denied it. In 1953 he was called
before Joseph McCarthy's Senate committee, where he chose not to testify against friends but
answered questions regarding his own activities and works. Shaken by the experience and afraid
to lose face and livelihood as a writer, he distanced himself from Communism, and his Selected
Poems (1959) left out most of his radical poems. In the 1960s some younger black writers found
him lacking in “militancy” on black causes. Though his posthumously published Panther and the
Lash (1967) was aimed at establishing solidarity with these writers, Hughes preferred to do so
without raw anger and what he considered hateful racial chauvinism.
The Social Poet.
Although Hughes wrote in many voices throughout his checkered career, he was always the
quintessentially “social poet,” whose folksy and deceptively simple expression sometimes
concealed his subtlety and complexity as a writer and thinker. For Hughes, being a social poet
meant writing not just about “roses and moonlight” but also about “poverty, trade unions, color
lines and colonies” (“My Adventures as a Social Poet”). As a writer and public figure Hughes
remained committed to challenging and subverting the many negative stereotypes that affected
the life chances of most African Americans. In his writings he explored the richness and
diversity of the African American experience, which he saw as closely connected to all of human
history and not as something apart. As he noted, “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate
the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind” (quoted in Rampersad,
vol. 2, p. 418). As his biographer Arnold Rampersad and others have noted, Hughes was both a
particularist and a cosmopolitan, and he did everything in his long literary career to make poetry
and art accessible to as many people as possible.
Bibliography

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and beyond Harlem. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence

Hill, 1983.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. 16 vols. Columbia:

University of Missouri Press, 2001–2004.
Hughes, Langston. “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” Phylon 8, no. 3 (1947): 205–212.
Reprinted in Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest

Writings, edited by Faith Berry, pp. 135–142. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Nation, 23 June 1926,

pp. 692–694.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1986–1988.
Singh, Amritjit. “Beyond the Mountain: Langston Hughes on Race/Class and Art.”

Langston Hughes Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 37–43.
Thurman, Wallace. Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman. Edited by Amritjit Singh
and Daniel M. Scott III. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
CITATION FOR THIS SOURCE:
Singh, Amritjit. "Hughes, Langston." Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From
the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Paul FinkelmanNew York: Oxford UP,
2008. Oxford African American Studies Center. Mon Dec 17 22:22:07 EST 2012.
<http://www.oxfordaasc.com/article/opr/t0005/e0587>.