LANGSTON HUGHES

BIOGRAPHY:

Langston Hughes was an American poet, essayist, playwright, and short story writer. He is still
considered one of the most renowned contributors to American literature in the 20th century. He
rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance and continued to produce experimental and
groundbreaking work for the next several decades. Hughes was known for vocalizing the
concerns of working-class African Americans. His work was deeply influenced by jazz, and he
often wrote in a simple and straightforward fashion, sometimes even using the vernacular.

Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, a descendant of prominent abolitionists. His racial
heritage was a mix of Indian, African, and French. Hughes's father moved to Mexico while the
poet was still a child, and Hughes's mother took him to Lawrenceville, Kansas to live with his
grandmother. Hughes and his mother lived an itinerant lifestyle while she looked for work, and
she made sure to expose her son to literature and theater. Hughes began writing at an early age
and published poems and short stories in his Cleveland high school periodical. He also became
the editor of the school's annual and was elected his class poet. Besides the work of Walt
Whitman and Carl Sandburg, Hughes found inspiration in the writing of leftists, philosophers,
and progressives.

After graduating from high school, Langston Hughes traveled to Mexico to visit his father.
Along the way, he composed his first major poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which was
published in W.E.B. DuBois's The Crisis. In 1921, Hughes wrote a prize-winning poem called
"The Weary Blues." That poem also appeared in a volume of the same name in 1926. Over the
next few years, Hughes met and befriended Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carl Van
Vechten, all of whom were associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes traveled
to Europe before graduating from Pennsylvania's Lincoln University in 1929.
In 1930, Hughes received a Harmon Foundation Medal for his novel Not Without Laughter. He
continued to garner public recognition and win awards for the next three decades, including the
Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP,
and an induction to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In the 1930s, Hughes's poems became more radical as the racial tensions in America became
increasingly divisive. His commitment to Marxist ideals is evident in pieces like "Good Morning
Revolution," and his internal conflict with Christianity is apparent in "Goodbye Christ" (1932),
which is also his most controversial poem. Hughes wrote about the Spanish Civil War in 1937
for theBaltimore Afro-American. During the 1930s, he also worked regularly in the theater,
collaborating with Zora Neale Hurston on Mule Bone (their friendship ended because of this
play; Hurston claimed full authorship).
Hughes eventually settled in Harlem but continued to travel throughout his life. He wrote sixteen
books of poetry, two novels, seven collections of short stories, two autobiographies, four
nonfiction works, ten books for children and more than twenty-five plays.

Hughes never married and is not known to have had any significant romantic relationships. He
died alone in 1967 at a hospital in Harlem due to complications from prostate cancer. The New
York Times obituary stated, "Mr. Hughes was sometimes characterized as the 'O. Henry of
Harlem.' He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was particularly well known
for his folksy humor.'"
While Langston Hughes wrote a myriad of plays, short stories, and essays, he is primarily known
for his poetry, especially the verses he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars and critics
regularly refer to him the “African American Poet Laureate of Democracy,” creating a parallel
between Hughes and Walt Whitman. Whitman, like Hughes, wrote about the everyday lives of
American men and women using simple language to invoke grand themes in a relatable way. In
1926, the New York Herald Tribune described Langston Hughes's poems as “always intensely
subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense.”
Hughes frequently used his poetry to convey messages of racial justice and democracy. His
distinct poetic voice celebrated the folkways, history, and daily lives of African Americans
during the early 20th Century.
Hughes was an erudite and ambitious young man who started writing poetry at a very young age.
He wrote his first jazz poem, “When Sue Wears Red,” when he was a teenager and was elected
the class poet of his high school. After graduating, Hughes traveled to Mexico to visit his father.
He crossed over the Mississippi River along the way, which inspired him to write one of his most
famous poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers." “The Weary Blues,” published in 1926, earned
Hughes the first place prize in Opportunity magazine's poetry competition. Later that year,
Hughes included "The Weary Blues" in a volume of the same name which was published in late
1926. WithThe Weary Blues, Langston Hughes became widely recognized as a defining voice of
the Harlem Renaissance. His poems were influenced by the rhythm of jazz and blues and
celebrated the life and vitality he observed all around him in Harlem.
Hughes's poems explore the daily lives of working-class African Americans. He wanted to
portray the dignity, soulfulness, and resilience of his people. His second volume of poetry, Fine
Clothes to the Jew, was published in 1927 and cemented his reputation as a "poet of the people."
Some critics found it difficult to embrace Hughes’s proletarian subjects and themes; the critic
Hoyt F. Fuller wrote that Hughes “chose to identify with plain black people—not because it
required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound
significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who,
frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people.”
In the 1930s, Hughes’s poems started to reflect his growing interest in Marxism and the changes
he saw in his community during the Great Depression. Hughes eventually moved more solidly
into writing plays and short stories, but he continued to publish volumes of poetry throughout the
1940s and 1950s. In 1951, he wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred, a book-length suite of
poems. Even though Hughes addresses familiar subjects like Harlem in his signature jazz-
influenced writing style, these later poems are darker, more layered, and more brutal in their
depiction of racial subjugation and insistent in calling for social change. The title of the book
comes from another one of Hughes’s famous poems – “Harlem” – in which the poet wonders
what happens to a dream that has been deferred and offers several alarming images to illustrate
the possibilities.
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement transformed America's racial consciousness. Hughes's
work remained popular among readers, but some of the more radical African American
intellectuals found his writing to be outdated. Others wondered why Hughes was not more
outspoken about racial politics during the charged conflicts that took place throughout the 1960s.
However, Hughes's reputation as a groundbreaking and original American voice has remained
intact throughout the subsequent years. Donald P. Gibson notes in the introduction to Modern
Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essaysthat Hughes “differed from most of his predecessors
 among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he
addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most
American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing
audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas
familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read.”

Harlem/Dream Deffered

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Or does it explode?

GODS

The ivory gods,