Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

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'.

"Rest at pale evening...

A tall slim tree...
Night coming tendrerly
Black like me.
(from Dream Variations, 1926)

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. 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. Hughes's parents separated and his mother
moved from city to city in search of work. In his rootless childhood, Hughes lived in Mexico,
Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. Part of his childhood Hughes lived with his
grandmother. At the age of 13 he moved back with his mother and her second husband. 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. After graduating from a high school in Cleveland, Hughes spent a year in Mexico
with his light-skinned father, who had found there a release as a successful cattle rancher from
racism of the North. On the train, when he returned to the north, Hughes wrote one of his most
famous poems, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'. It appeared in the African-American journal Crisis
(1921). As an adolescent in Cleveland he participated in the activity of Karamu Players, and
published in 1921 his first play, THE GOLDEN PIECE in 1921.

Supported by his father, Hughes entered in the early 1920s the Columbia University, New York.
For the permanent disappointment of his father, Hughes soon abandoned his studies, 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 doorman and a bouncer of a night club, and continued
to Italy.

After his return to the United States, Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems, which
earned him scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. According an anecdote, Hughes
was "discovered" by the poet Vachel Lindsay in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the
Wardman Park Hotel, where Hughes worked as a busboy, and dropped his poems beside the
Lindsay's dinner plate. Lindsay included several of them in his poetry reading. It prompted
interviews of the "busboy poet". Hughes quit his job and moved to New York City.

In 1929 Hughes received his bachelor's degree. He was celebrated as a young promising poet of
the generation, publishing his poetry in Crisis (1923-24) and in Alain Locke's anthology The
New Negro (1925). His first book of verse, THE WEARY BLUES, supported by Carl Van
Vechten, appeared in 1926. "My news is this: that I handed The Weary Blues to Knopf yesterday
with the proper incantations. I do not feel particularly dubious about the outcome: your poems
are too beautiful to escape appreciation. I find they have a subtle haunting quality which lingers
in the memory and an extraordinary sensitivity to all that is kind and lovely." (from Van Vechten's
letter to Hughes in Remember me to Harlem, ed. by Emily Bernard, 2001) Hughes valued Van Vechten's
criticism and dedicated him his second collection of poetry, FINE CLOTHES TO THE JEW
(1927). Their correspondence, which lasted until Van Vechten's death in 1964, was published in
2001. The Weary Blues assimilated techniques associated with the secular music with verse,
while its content reflected the lives of African-Americans. "Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune,
/ Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play. / By the pale dull pallor of an
old gas light / He did a lazy sway... / He did a lazy sway..." (from 'The Weary Blues,' the title poem of
the collection)

Hughes was considered one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s His
first novel, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER (1930), Hughes wrote with the financial support of
Charlotte Mason, a wealthy white woman. The book had a cordial reception and Hughes bought
a Ford. He toured the colleges of southern America as a teacher and poet.

Hughes was one of the first black authors, who could support himself by his writings. In the
1930s Hughes traveled in the Soviet Union, Haiti, and Japan. During his visit in the Soviet
Union, to write the English dialogue for a film about black American workers, he had also an
affair with an Oriental ballerina. Hughes's poem 'Goodbye, Christ', written during the journey,
was attacked by a right-wing religious group in the 1940s. Although Hughes decided to repudiate
the poem publicly, he also embraced radical politics, publishing a collection of satiric short
stories, THE WAY OF WHITE FOLKS (1943), and returned to satire and racial prejudices later
in LAUGHING TO KEEP FROM CRYING (1952) and SOMETHING IN COMMON (1963).
Hughes emphasized the importance of African culture and shared Du Bois's belief that renewal
could only come from an understanding of African roots.

"My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?"
(from 'Cross')

Hughes's play THE MULATTO (1935), revised without his knowledge, opened on Broadway in
1935. The producer inserted a rape in it. Alterations displeased Hughes, but in the same year he
won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He founded in the 1930s and 1940s black theatre groups in
Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the Spanish Civil War (1937) he served as a newspaper
correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American. During this time he became a friend of Ernest
Hemingway, with whom he attended bullfights. In 1942 he made Harlem his permanent home,
although he began lecturing at universities around the country. Hughes wrote children's stories,
non-fiction, and numerous works for the stage, including lyrics for Kurt Weill's and Elmer Rice's
opera Street Scene, screenplay for the Hollywood film Way Down South with the actor Clarence
Muse, and translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. Hughes's
Christmas play, Black Nativity, has been produced every year by major black theaters.

Hughes's inaccurate reputation for being a Communist dates from his poems in the 1930s. In
1953, during the era of McCarthyism, Hughes tested to the Senate committee that he was not,
and never had been, a Communist. He named no names, well aware of blacklisting and its effects
on such radicals as Paul Robertson. In several of his poems, Hughes had expressed with ardent
voice sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people, whose lives were impacted by racism and
sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger,
hopelessness. But basically he was a conscientious artist, kept his middle-of-the road stance and
worked hard to chronicle the black American experience, contrasting the beauty of the soul with
the oppressive circumstance.

"Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud -
Not like a shroud."
(from Color, 1943)

In the 1950s Hughes published among others MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED (1951),
which included his famous poem 'Harlem', PICTORIAL HISTORY OF NEGRO IN AMERICA
(1956), and edited THE BOOK OF NEGRO FOLKLORE (1958) with Arna Bontemps. Hughes's
autobiographicals books include THE BIG SEA (1940) and I WONDER AS I WANDER (1956).
For juveniles he did a series of 'Famous' biographies, beginning with FAMOUS AMERICAN
NEGROES (1954). His popular comic character Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple," appeared in
columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Hughes had met the prototype of the
character in a bar. The ironic comments of the street-wise Harlem dweller were first collected
into SIMPLE SPEAKS HIS MIND (1950). In the last Simple collection, SIMPLE'S UNCLE
SAM (1965), Hughes wrote: "My mama should have named me Job instead of Jesse B. Semple. I
have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken - yet I am still
here. The only thing I am afraid of now - is that I will die before my time."

In his later years Hughes held posts at the Universities of Chicago and Atlanta. The poet also
witnessed that doctoral dissertations already begun to be written about him - the earliest book on
his work appeared already in the 1930s. Hughes never married and there has been unrelevant
speculations about his sexuality. Several of his friends were homosexual, among them Carl Van
Vechten, who wrote the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926) - Hughes had recommended
the choice of the title - but several were not. Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on
May 22, 1967, of complications after surgery. His collection of political poems, THE PANTHER
AND THE LASH (1967), reflected the anger and militancy of the 1960s. The book had been
rejected first by Knopf in 1964 as too risky. Hughes's own history of NAACP appeared in 1962;
he had received a few year's earlier the NAACP'S Spingarn Medal.

Hughes published more than 35 books, he was a versatile writer, but he hated "long novels,
narrative poems", as he once said. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the
Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin,
who, however, criticized Hughes's poetic achievement. From the late 1940's through the 1950's
Hughes revised under pressure his poems- may of them became less tough.