James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, to James Nathaniel Hughes, a lawyer and businessman, and Carrie Mercer (Langston) Hughes, a teacher. The couple separated shortly thereafter. James Hughes was, by his sons account, a cold man who hated blacks (and hated himself for being one), feeling that most of them deserved their ill fortune because of what he considered their ignorance and laziness. Langstons youthful visits to him there, although sometimes for extended periods, were strained and painful.
He attended Columbia University in 1921-22, and when he died he, left everything to three elderly women who had cared for him in his last illness, and Langston was not even mentioned in his will. Hughes mother went through protracted separations and reconciliations in her second marriage (she and her son from this marriage would live with him off and on in later years. He was raised by alternately by her, by his maternal grandmother, and, after his grandmothers death, by family friends.
By the time he was fourteen, he had lived in Joplin; Buffalo; Cleveland; Lawrence, Kansas; Mexico City; Topeka, Kansas; Colorado Springs; Kansas City; and Lincoln, Illinois. In 1915, he was class poet of his grammar-school graduating class in Lincoln. From 1916 to 1920, he attended Central High School in Cleveland, where he was a star athlete, wrote poetry and short stories (and published many of them in the Central High Monthly), and on his own read such modern poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg.
His classmates were for the most part the children of European immigrants, who treated him largely without discrimination and introduced him to leftist political ideas. After graduation in 1920, he went to Mexico to teach English for a year. While on the train to Mexico, he wrote the poem the Negro Speaks of Rivers, which was published in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis, a leading black publication. After his academic year at Columbia, he lived for a year in Harlem, embarked on a six-month voyage as a cabin boy on a merchant freighter bound for West Africa.
After its return, he took a job on a ship sailing to Holland. After being robbed on a train in Italy and working his passage back to New York in November of 1924, Hughes moved in with his mother and brother in a small, unheated apartment in Washington, D. C. , where he worked in a laundry. For a time, he worked as an assistant to the distinguished black historian Dr. Carter A. Woodson, but he found the tedious research tasks disagreeable, and he was angered and offended by the harsh, avert segregation of life in the nations capital.
He also began to make the acquaintance of writers and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the extraordinary flourishing of black arts and culture in the 1920s. He won prizes in poetry contests sponsored by the black journals Opportunity and The Crisis, and also had poems accepted by Vanity, a leading mainstream journal of the arts. In May 1925, Opportunity held a dinner for its award winners, where Hughes was sought out by Carl Van Vechten, whom he had met the previous year.
He was a photographer who had interested himself in the Harlem Renaissance, asked recommend to his own publisher. Less than three weeks later, The Weary Blues was accepted for publication by the prestigious New York firm of Alfred A. Knopf. While waiting for the books publication, Hughes was working as a busboy at Washingtons Ward man Park Hotel, where, while serving the poet Vachel Lindsay and his wife at dinner, he left several of his own poems on the table.
Lindsay read them that evening to a large audience at his poetry reading, and the story of his discovery (he was unaware that Hughes had already published widely in magazines and had a book in press, although he accepted the discovery of these facts quite good-naturedly) was locally and then nationally reported, bringing Hughes a good deal of welcome publicity. Literary Career The Weary Blues appeared at the beginning of 1926.
Some of its poems were in dialect, on jazz and cabaret themes; others were more traditional and formal in nature, often expressing great loneliness and isolation. The book contained what would become some of his most famous works, including Mother to Son, I, Too and the title poem. The reviews were generally favorable in both the black and the white press, including, to Hughes surprise, white newspapers in the South. Also early in 1926, Hughes enrolled in tiny Lincoln University in southeastern Pennsylvania, from which he would graduate in 1929.
In the spring of that year, he met Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason, a very wealthy widow who had devoted a good part of her considerable fortune to her interest in Native American and African American cultures. She became Hughess patron, and would become be his main source of financial support for the next four years, until a break that was brought by his resistance to her attempts to control his work schedule and his career.
Thereafter, he continued, as always, to support himself through various jobs rather than steady employment. But, now having established himself as a literary figure, he was able to find the kinds of writing, editing and lecturing assignments that would become the pattern for the rest of his life. Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Hughes second book, was because of his emphasis on telling the truth no matter how unpleasant some might find it, something of a setback for him.
Its titlewhich alluded to the necessity of bringing ones wardrobe, in hard times, to a pawnbroker (many of whom where Jewish, especially in black neighborhoods) was somewhat offensive to many white readers, while the poems themselves, straightforward treatments of the harsh and gritty lives of ordinary black people, were offensive to many black critics and intellectuals, who wanted only the most positive and refined images of black life to be presented for the inspection of white audiences.
While Hughes was not unsympathetic to the feelings of such critics, he rejected their basic assumptions as a willingness to allow the dominant white society to dictate the terms upon which black people; their values and their lifestyles would be judged. During the highly politicized 1930s, Hughes has journeyed to the Soviet Union with a group of black filmmakers. Growing disillusioned with the filmmakers and their project, he toured Russia and part of Asia on his own.
Despite his interest in leftist political causes, he apparently never became a communist. After his return to America, he was involved in the founding of several theatrical companies in Harlem, Los Angeles, and Chicago. He also wrote and published some overly political poetry, including defenses of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths in the deep South who had been, under sensational and extremely dubious circumstances, convicted of raping two young white women.
His most important later volume of poetry is unquestionably Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which weaves lyrics drawn from the lives of the people of Harlem Hughess home from (1947) to the end of his lifeinto a unified work that gives a remarkably full and vivid portrait of a community, its hopes and fears, its aspirations and frustrations. One of its most famous lyrics would later provide the title for Lorraine Hans berrys play A raisin in the Sun. Hughes also became an extremely prolific writer of prose, publishing two autobiographies, two novels, several volumes of short stories, and a number of plays.
By far his best-known and most beloved fictional creation was Jesse B. Semple, a Virginia native and Harlem resident know affectionately as Simple. His complicated love life, his anger and frustration at the indignities of segregation, his innate sorrow in the midst of a humorous and often conveyed through a series of brief sketches (ultimately collected in five volumes), in which he traded opinions with somewhat stuffy and respectable acquaintance, who served as foil for Simples much more unguarded and unconventional views. Both characters were drawn from aspects of Hughess own personality.
The inspiration for Simple had originally come to Hughes through a conversation with a defense-plant work in January 1943. The first Simple sketch, intended to serve as pro-war propaganda, appeared a month later in Hughess regular column in the Chicago Defender, black newspaper with a national readership. From the beginning, Simple was a great hit with Hughess readersalthough, as so often with his work, the sketches drew objections from more respectable typesand has remained on of the most enduring aspects of his achievement.
Hughess remained extremely prolific to the very end of his life. He published more than forty books, including a series of juvenile titles undertaken largely for financial reasons. If one were to add his translations and his many anthologies of black writing, the list would virtually double. He remained a controversial figure to the end. Having been considered a dangerous radical in the 1930s, he was now, as he retained his lifelong commitment to integration and racial harmony, rejected by 1960s radicals as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
In May 1967, Hughes under went surgery for an enlarged prostate gland. Complications set in after the operation: he developed bronchial pneumonia and kidney infection, and died of a congestive heart failure on May 22. He was 65 years old. His popularity has not diminished in the thirty years since his death. He is, if anything, more popular now than ever before. He was the subject of a two-volume biography in the 1980s, and his Collected Poems was issued in 1994.
Despite his dismissal by some critics as a middlebrow entertainer rather than a serious artist, new studies of his work, emphasizing the skill and depth of his finest works, continue to appear on a regular basis. His life long affection for, and identification with ordinary black people, and his vivid and affectionate rendering of their lives and their own language, he has a place in the hearts of many of his readers that goes far beyond his literary accomplishments, considerable as they are.
In closing, Langston Hughes seemed like a gentle well-mannered man, who spent much of his life at the center of controversy. He devoted his art to the true expression of the lives, hopes, fears, and angers of ordinary black people, with out self-consciousness or sugar coating. I feel his devotion and dedication has been repaid with extraordinary and continuing popularity, as well as critical acceptance.
