Hughes, Langston 1902-1967

HUGHES, LANGSTON 1902-1967

Writer

Early Writings

The "poet laureate of the Negro race" was born into a troubled family, albeit one with a long history of abolitionist activism. Abandoned by his father's immigration to Mexico, young Langston and his mother moved in with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent an unhappy, lonely childhood. In 1915 his mother moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio, where he began publishing stories and poems in the highschool magazine, reflecting his concerns with race and social justice.

Travel and First Book

After high school and a stay in Mexico with his father, Hughes returned to the United States for a year at Columbia University. Throughout a period that included odd jobs in New York, work as a messboy on ships traveling to Africa and Europe, and a job washing dishes in a Paris nightclub featuring black entertainers, Hughes was publishing poems in journals such as The Crisis, the journal for the NAACP, and Opportunity, the journal for the Urban League. As a result, even before he returned to Washington, D.C., in late 1924, he had developed a reputation among black poetry readers in America. He continued to work at menial jobs for a while, but in 1926 he published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues. Soon after, he enrolled at Lincoln University, a predominantly black-school in Pennsylvania.

Major Bílack Poet

By the time he graduated from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes had published a second yolume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), and had established himself as one of the major young poets of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was nontraditional in form and brutal in its honest look at black poverty and anger. Some black critics found his portrayal of black life demeaning, to which Hughes responded, "I have a right to portray any side of Negro life I wish to."

Radicalism

In the early 1930s he began to turn sharply toward the radical Left, writing for Communist journals and working for leftist causes. His defense of the Scottsboro Boys included a radical verse play titled Scottsboro Limited (1931). In 1932 he joined a team of black artists traveling to the Soviet Union to make a film on race relations. The project fell through, but Hughes was celebrated in the Soviet Union as a radical writer, and he reciprocated by producing the most radical poetry of his life (some of which he later disavowed). For the remainder of the decade he traveled in and out of the United States—to China, Japan, Mexico, Spain—and his literary interests turned toward fiction and drama.

"Simple" and Later Work

During this time he published an important volume of stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and saw his play on miscegenation, Mulatto, produced on Broadway (1935). He served briefly in 1938 as a war correspondent in Spain, then returned to the United States and founded the Harlem Suitcase Theatre. With the coming of World War II, Hughes abandoned the Left and became a columnist for The Chicago Defender. One of his most memorable creations was the character Jesse B. Semple, called "Simple," a black Everyman who would turn up regularly in his column. Hughes later compiled those "Simple" sketches into books and an Off-Broadway musical play. In the twenty years between the war and his death in 1967, he became prodigious in his production of literary works—highlighted by Broadway musicals, including Street Scene (1947) and Black Nativity (1961), a two-volume autobiography, a novel, two additional volumes of stories, a history of the NAACP, seven children's books on black culture, and five additional volumes of verse, including the highly acclaimed bebop collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). The most important literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of America's representative poets, he died in New York in 1967.

Sources:

Langstom Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander; An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Rinehart, 1956);

Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).