Langston Hughes

American author Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a moving spirit in the artistic ferment of the 1920s often called the Harlem Renaissance, expressed the mind and spirit of most African Americans for nearly half a century.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., on Feb. 1, 1902. His parents soon separated, and Hughes was reared mainly by his mother, his maternal grandmother, and a childless couple named Reed. He attended public schools in Kansas and Illinois, graduating from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1920. His high school companions, most of whom were white, remembered him as a handsome "Indian-looking" youth whom everyone liked and respected for his quiet, natural ways and his abilities. He won an athletic letter in track and held offices in the student council and the American Civic Association. In his senior year he was chosen class poet and yearbook editor.

Hughes spent the next year in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing. But Hughes's poetry and prose were beginning to appear in the Brownie's Book, a publication for children edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and he was starting work on more ambitious material dealing with adult realities. The poem "A Negro Speaks of River," which marked this development, appeared in the Crisis in 1921.

Hughes returned to America and enrolled at Columbia University; meanwhile, the Crisis printed several more of his poems. Finding the atmosphere at Columbia uncongenial, Hughes left after a year. He did odd jobs in New York. In 1923 he signed on as steward on a freighter. His first voyage took him down the west coast of Africa; his second took him to Spain. In 1924 he spent 6 months in Paris. He was relatively happy, produced some prose, and experimented with what he called "racial rhythms" in poetry. Most of this verse appeared in African American publications, but Vanity Fair, a magazine popular among middle-and upper-class women, published three poems.

Later in 1924 Hughes went to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. He hoped to earn enough money to return to college, but work as a hotel busboy paid very little, and life in the nation's capital, where class distinctions among African Americans were quite rigid, made him unhappy. He wrote many poems. "The Weary Blues" won first prize in 1925 in a literary competition sponsored by Opportunity, a magazine published by the National Urban League. That summer one of his essays and another poem won prizes in the Crisis literary contest. Meanwhile, Hughes had come to the attention of Carl Van Vechten, a white novelist and critic, who arranged publication of Hughes's first volume of verse, The Weary Blues (1926).

This book projected Hughes's enduring themes, established his style, and suggested the wide range of his poetic talent. It showed him committed to racial themes—pride in blackness and in his African heritage, the tragic mulatto, the everyday life of African Americans—and democracy and patriotism. Hughes transformed the bitterness which such themes generated in many of his African American contemporaries into sharp irony, gentle satire, and humor. His casual-seeming, folklike style, reflecting the simplicity and the earthy sincerity of his people, was strengthened in his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).

Hughes had resumed his education in 1925 and graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. Not without Laughter (1930) was his first novel. The story deals with an African American boy, Sandy, caught between two worlds and two attitudes. The boy's hardworking, respectability-seeking mother provides a counterpoint to his high-spirited, easy-laughing, footloose father. The mother is oriented to the middle-class values of the white world; the father believes that fun and laughter are the only virtues worth pursuing. Though the boy's character is blurred, Hughes's attention to details that reveal African American culture in America gives the novel strength.

The relative commercial success of his novel inspired Hughes to try making his living as an author. In 1931 he made the first of what became annual lecture tours. He took a trip to Soviet Union the next year. Meanwhile, he turned out poems, essays, book reviews, song lyrics, plays, and short stories. He edited five anthologies of African American writing and collaborated with Arna Bontemps on another and on a book for children. He wrote some 20 plays, including Mulatto, Simply Heavenly, and Tambourines to Glory. He translated Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, and Gabriela Mistral, the Latin American Nobel laureate poet, and wrote two long autobiographical works.

As a newspaper columnist, Hughes created "Simple," probably his most enduring character, brought his style to perfection, and solidified his reputation as the "most eloquent spokesman" for African Americans. The Simple sketches, collected in five volumes, are presented as conversations between an uneducated, African American city dweller, Jesse B. Semple (Simple), and an educated but less sensitive African American acquaintance. The sketches, which ran in the Chicago Defender for 25 years, are too varied in subject, too relevant to the universal human condition, and too remarkable in their display of Hughes's best writing for any quick summary. That Simple is a universal man, even though his language, habits, and personality are the result of his particular experiences as an African American man, is a measure of Hughes's genius.

Hughes received numerous fellowships, awards, and honorary degrees, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award (1953) for a book on improving race relations. He taught creative writing at two universities; had his plays produced on four continents; and made recordings of African American history, music commentary, and his own poetry. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His work, some of which was translated into a dozen languages, earned him an international reputation unlike any other African American writer except Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Forty-seven volumes bear Hughes's name. He died in New York City on May 22, 1967.

Further Reading

The chief sources of biographical data are Hughes's autobiographical The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956); Donald C. Dickinson, A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967 (1967); James A. Emanuel, Langston Hughes (1967); Milton Meltzer, Langston Hughes: A Biography (1968); and Charlemae H. Rollins, Black Troubadour: Langston Hughes (1970). Hughes gets extensive critical treatment in Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (1939); Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948); John Milton Charles Hughes, The Negro Novelist, 1940-1950 (1953); and Robert A. Boone, The Negro Novel in America (1958). Historical background is provided by Benjamin O. Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947; 3d ed. 1967); and Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (1959). □

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).

Hughes, Langston (1902–1967), African American writer.Born in Joplin, Missouri, and educated at Columbia and Lincoln universities, Langston Hughes established himself as a writer with The Weary Blues (1926), a collection of poems influenced by jazz rhythms. Subsequent poetry collections, notably Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and The Panther and the Lash (1967), solidified his reputation as the “Negro Poet Laureate.” A central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes wrote prolifically, producing a novel, Not without Laughter (1930), as well as children's books, plays, musicals, radio scripts, and two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). His humorous columns in The Chicago Defender newspaper, featuring Jess B. Semple, a fictional character who offered commonsense but cutting critiques of American culture, enjoyed a large following. In the 1930s and after, Hughes's writing increasingly reflected his social activism. He founded black theaters in Chicago, Harlem, and Los Angeles, and traveled extensively in the United States and abroad investigating race relations. In 1960, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded him its Spingarn Medal.

A voice of social protest, Hughes blurred the line between high and low culture, addressing black audiences through the use of oral tradition, improvisation, and mass cultural forms, including the gospel musical play. His writing for children, in particular, reflected his belief that race consciousness and pride could be transmitted through literature and art. Renowned for the humor and compassion that suffused his vision of social renewal, Hughes ranks among the most influential American writers of the twentieth century.
See also African Americans; Literature: Since World War I.

Bibliography

Arnold Rampersad , The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols., 1988, 1989.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds., Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993.

Tanya Agathocleous

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.

Hughes, Langston (1902–67) US poet and leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His debut volume was The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes' distinctive musical style combined African-American dialect with the rhythms of jazz and blues. Ohter works include Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and One-Way Ticket (1949).

Hughes, Langston, see jazz poetry; performance poetry.

Hughes, Langston. See Mulatto.