Hughes, (James) Langston

Hughes, [James] Langston (1902–67), Missouri‐born major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, had a nomadic life in the U.S. and Europe until he began his prolific literary career with The Weary Blues (1926), poems on black themes in jazz rhythms and idiom, whose success made possible his college career at Lincoln University, Pa. (A.B., 1929). His subsequent publications were in diverse media, but he is most widely known for his poetry issued in more than ten books and pamphlets, including Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Dear Lovely Death (1931), The Negro Mother (1931), The Dream Keeper (1932), A New Song (1938), Shakespeare in Harlem (1941), Fields of Wonder (1947), One‐Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and Ask Your Mama (1961). His concern with his race, mainly in an urban setting, is evident in these works, as is his social consciousness, evident also in the topical Scottsboro Limited (1932), four poems and a one‐act play on the Scottsboro Case. He also wrote two novels, Not Without Laughter (1930) and Tambourines to Glory (1958), and collections of stories including The Ways of White Folks (1934) and Something in Common (1963), but his major prose writings are those concerned with his character Jesse B. Semple, satirical sketches of a shrewd but supposedly ignorant Harlem resident who, under his nickname Simple, appears in five volumes. For the stage Hughes wrote several plays, including Mulatto (1936), revised as a musical drama, The Barrier (1950); a musical version of Tambourines to Glory (1963); and Simply Heavenly (1963), also a musical play, based on his stories about Simple. He wrote two autobiographical volumes, The Big Sea (1940), about his youth and his life in the 1920s, and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), carrying on his experiences to 1938. Other writings include Fight for Freedom (1962), about the NAACP, while his correspondence with Arna Bontemps, with whom he also collaborated on the musical Tambourines to Glory, was published in 1979.