Life of Langston Hughes

Through the love of his people, Langston Hughes formed a special bond with African American readers in the United States as he demonstrated the struggles, sorrows, victories, and joys of black people. James Langston Hughes was born on February 1st, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, but because of his parent’s separation, he grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas with his grandmother (Langston Hughes). Hughes grew up in poverty, and the frequent absences of his mother and aging grandmother made him “unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome;” however, he discovered that books “began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books— where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language (Smith 367).Hughes’s first works appeared in the monthly high school magazine where he published short stories about racism (Smith 368). After graduating high school, Hughes had composed memorable poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” and “When Sue Wears Red,” which expressed Hughes’s first major literary response to the segregation he encountered during childhood (Smith 368). Not long after, Hughes led a varied life of writing and working at various humbling jobs, including, a messman on ships anchored in the Hudson River, which allowed him to visit west coast of Africa (Smith 368).

Langston Hughes’s early poems captured some of the sights and sounds of the rhythms of blues and jazz, in which he had “taken an indigenous African American art form, perhaps the most vivid and commanding of all, and preserved its authenticity even as he formally enshrined it in the midst of a poem in traditional European form” (Smith 369). The subject matters of the blues—“love and raw sexuality, deep sorrow and sudden violence, poverty and heartbreak” made Langston Hughes one of the most controversial black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes clearly came to decisions about changes for the future, and decided to spend a year in the Soviet Union, where he contrasted the “humane Soviet treatment of its ethnic minorities with the horrors of American segregation,” in which he wrote and published the most radical verses of his life (Smith 370).

His finest volume in many years, Montage of a Dream Deferred, was a collection of poems about Harlem that reflected the “pressures of northern urban life on black migrants from the South but also of the spectacular way in which the jazz musicians maturing around the end of responded to those pressures in the new “bebop” jazz” (Smith 372). Included in Montage of a Dream Deferred is one of the most widely known and cherished poems, “Harlem” (“dream deferred”), which included special insight into the African American condition in Harlem (Smith 375). In his last years, Langston Hughes became a spokesman for civil rights, and died in Harlem in 1967 (Langston Hughes). Langston Hughes was African America’s most influential writer and a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

"Langston Hughes." Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th Edition. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson Longman, 2010.Print. 694-709.

Langston Hughes. Photograph. African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. 369. Print.

Smith, Valerie. "Introduction." Introduction. African American Writers. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. 367-377. Print.