Monday, February 14, 2011

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


    • 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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