Langston Hughes: Gale - Free Resources - Black History - Biographies -

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  • Langston Hughes

    (1902-1967)
    Writer, editor, lecturer

  • novelist, columnist, playwright, and essayist
  • world travels influenced his writing
  • His long and distinguished career produced volumes of diverse genres and inspired the work of countless other African American writers.
  • "a Harlem Renaissance poet"
  • search for employment led his mother and stepfather, Homer Clark, to move several times.
  • households of his grandmother, his mother, and other surrogate parents
  • Hughes often transformed his own agonies into the sufferings endured by the collective race and sometimes all of humankind.
  • After graduating from Central High School in Cleveland in 1920, he moved to Mexico City to live with his father for one year.
  • race, class, and ethnicity
  • poverty
  • world travels
  • Paris
  • Africa
  • Washington, D.C.
  • first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926
  • soaking up theater and music in nearby New York City
  • A second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published in 1927
  • first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930
  • He expressed disappointment with the completed novel
  • In 1930, however, Hughes separated from the control and the financial support of Mason.
  • integrity meant more to him than any luxuries her wealth could provide
  • began to tour the South with his poetry
  • Hughes created poetic and dramatic responses to the men's plight and the mixed reactions of the American public.
  • Russia
  • explore the Soviet Union
  • saw many reasons to appreciate communism
  • openly praised practices he had observed in the Soviet Union: no "Jim Crow," no anti-Semitism, and education and medical care for everyone
  • World War II Efforts
  • Hughes escaped military service
  • put his pen to work on behalf of political involvement and nationalism
  • encouraged readers to support the Allies
  • During the 1940s Hughes's poetry also continued to be published: Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), and One-Way Ticket (1949)
  • Cold War
  • Hughes endured several years of attacks and boycotts
  • insisting that the pro-Communist works he had published no longer represented his thinking
  • Hughes chose self-preservation and sustained his career as a writer
  • Frenzied Work Pace
  • accept multiple book contracts simultaneously
  • frantic pace of writing, editing, revising, and publishing from the 1950s to the end of his life
  • The last ten years of Hughes's life were marked by an astonishing proliferation of books: juvenile histories, poetry volumes, single genres anthologies
  • Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961
  • Hughes's death on May 22, 1967, apparently resulted from infection following prostate surgery and two weeks of treatment

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