what is langston hughes biography

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Langston Hughes

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: January 24, 2023

Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance  as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working class, earning him renown as one of America’s most notable poets.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901 ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea , which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP ’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

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Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City . He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world.

Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. He soon published Not Without Laughter , his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as the father of jazz poetry, a literary genre influenced by or sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by the music.

“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain .”

Writing for a general audience, his subject matter continued to focus on ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote that his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

He also did not shy from writing about his experiences and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain . “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union in the 1930s, showing an interest in communism . (He was called to testify before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston , his first play, which would be the first of many. “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “ Harlem ” in which he writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and set up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism blocked his efforts.

He worked as a newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American , writing about Black American soldiers fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War . He also wrote a column from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender , a Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation , World War II and the treatment of Black people in America. The column often featured the fictitious Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, patriotic stories about Black culture and achievements, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust and respect when an older woman he tries to rob ends up taking him home and giving him a meal.

Hughes died in New York from complications during surgery to treat prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register of Places a year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 poem, " I, too, " is engraved on the wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“ Langston Hughes ,” The Library of Congress

“ Langston Hughes: The People's Poet ,” Smithsonian Magazine

“ The Blues and Langston Hughes ,” Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

“ Langston Hughes ,” Poets.org

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Biography of Langston Hughes, Poet, Key Figure in Harlem Renaissance

Hughes wrote about the African-American experience

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Langston Hughes was a singular voice in American poetry, writing with vivid imagery and jazz-influenced rhythms about the everyday Black experience in the United States. While best-known for his modern, free-form poetry with superficial simplicity masking deeper symbolism, Hughes worked in fiction, drama, and film as well.

Hughes purposefully mixed his own personal experiences into his work, setting him apart from other major Black poets of the era, and placing him at the forefront of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance . From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, this explosion of poetry and other work by Black Americans profoundly changed the artistic landscape of the country and continues to influence writers to this day.

Fast Facts: Langston Hughes

• Full Name: James Mercer Langston Hughes
• Known For: Poet, novelist, journalist, activist
• Born: February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri
• Parents: James and Caroline Hughes (née Langston)
• Died: May 22, 1967 in New York, New York
• Education: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania
• Selected Works: The Weary Blues, The Ways of White Folks, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Montage of a Dream Deferred
•  Notable Quote: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Early Years

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father divorced his mother shortly thereafter and left them to travel. As a result of the split, he was primarily raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, who had a strong influence on Hughes, educating him in the oral traditions of his people and impressing upon him a sense of pride; she was referred to often in his poems. After Mary Langston died, Hughes moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her new husband. He began writing poetry shortly after enrolling in high school.

Hughes moved to Mexico in 1919 to live with his father for a short time. In 1920, Hughes graduated high school and returned to Mexico. He wished to attend Columbia University in New York and lobbied his father for financial assistance; his father did not think writing was a good career, and offered to pay for college only if Hughes studied engineering. Hughes attended Columbia University in 1921 and did well, but found the racism he encountered there to be corrosive—though the surrounding Harlem neighborhood was inspiring to him. His affection for Harlem remained strong for the rest of his life. He left Columbia after one year, worked a series of odd jobs, and traveled to Africa working as a crewman on a boat, and from there on to Paris. There he became part of the Black expatriate community of artists.

The Crisis to Fine Clothes to the Jew (1921-1930)

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)
• The Weary Blues (1926)
• The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
• Not Without Laughter (1930)

Hughes wrote his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers while still in high school, and published it in The Crisis , the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The poem gained Hughes a great deal of attention; influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, it is a tribute to Black people throughout history in a free verse format:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes began to publish poems on a regular basis, and in 1925 won the Poetry Prize from Opportunity Magazine . Fellow writer Carl Van Vechten, who Hughes had met on his overseas travels, sent Hughes’ work to Alfred A. Knopf, who enthusiastically published Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926.

Around the same time, Hughes took advantage of his job as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel to give several poems to poet Vachel Lindsay, who began to champion Hughes in the mainstream media of the time, claiming to have discovered him. Based on these literary successes, Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and published The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in The Nation . The piece was a manifesto calling for more Black artists to produce Black-centric art without worrying whether white audiences would appreciate it—or approve of it.

In 1927, Hughes published his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. In 1930, Hughes published Not Without Laughter , which is sometimes described as a "prose poem" and sometimes as a novel, signaling his continued evolution and his impending experiments outside of poetry.

By this point, Hughes was firmly established as a leading light in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. The literary movement celebrated Black art and culture as public interest in the subject soared.

Fiction, Film, and Theater Work (1931-1949)

• The Ways of White Folks (1934)
• Mulatto (1935)
• Way Down South (1935)
• The Big Sea (1940)

Hughes traveled through the American South in 1931 and his work became more forcefully political, as he became increasingly aware of the racial injustices of the time. Always sympathetic to communist political theory, seeing it as an alternative to the implicit racism of capitalism, he also traveled extensively through the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

He published his first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks , in 1934. The story cycle is marked by a certain pessimism in regards to race relations; Hughes seems to suggest in these stories that there will never be a time without racism in this country. His play Mulatto , first staged in 1935, deals with many of the same themes as the most famous story in the collection, Cora Unashamed , which tells the story of a Black servant who develops a close emotional bond with the young white daughter of her employers.

Hughes became increasingly interested in the theater, and founded the New York Suitcase Theater with Paul Peters in 1931. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, he also co-founded a theater troupe in Los Angeles while co-writing the screenplay for the film Way Down South . Hughes imagined he would be an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood; his failure to gain much success in the industry was put down to racism. He wrote and published his autobiography The Big Sea in 1940 despite being only 28 years old; the chapter titled Black Renaissance discussed the literary movement in Harlem and inspired the name "Harlem Renaissance."

Continuing his interest in theater, Hughes founded the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941 and began writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender , which he would continue to write for two decades. After World War II and the Civil Rights Movement ’s rise and successes, Hughes found that the younger generation of Black artists, coming into a world where segregation was ending and real progress seemed possible in terms of race relations and the Black experience, saw him as a relic of the past. His style of writing and Black-centric subject matter seemed passé .

Children’s Books and Later Work (1950-1967)

• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
• The First Book of the Negroes (1952)
• I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956)
• The Book of Negro Folklore (1958)

Hughes attempted to interact with the new generation of Black artists by directly addressing them, but rejecting what he saw as their vulgarity and over-intellectual approach. His epic poem "suite," Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) took inspiration from jazz music, collecting a series of related poems sharing the overarching theme of a "dream deferred" into something akin to a film montage—a series of images and short poems following quickly after each other in order to position references and symbolism together. The most famous section from the larger poem is the most direct and powerful statement of the theme, known as Harlem :

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 like a heavy load. Or does it explode ?

In 1956, Hughes published his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander . He took a greater interest in documenting the cultural history of Black America, producing A Pictorial History of the Negro in America in 1956, and editing The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958.

Hughes continued to work throughout the 1960s and was considered by many to be the leading writer of Black America at the time, although none of his works after Montage of a Dream Deferred approached the power and clarity of his work during his prime.

Although Hughes had previously published a book for children in 1932 ( Popo and Fifina ), in the 1950s he began publishing books specifically for children regularly, including his First Book series, which was designed to instill a sense of pride in and respect for the cultural achievements of African Americans in its youth. The series included The First Book of the Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1954), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1964).

The tone of these children’s books was perceived as very patriotic as well as focused on the appreciation of Black culture and history. Many people, aware of Hughes’ flirtations with communism and his run-in with Senator McCarthy , suspected he attempted to make his children’s books self-consciously patriotic in order to combat any perception that he might not be a loyal citizen.

Personal Life

While Hughes reportedly had several affairs with women during his life, he never married or had children. Theories concerning his sexual orientation abound; many believe that Hughes, known for strong affections for Black men in his life, seeded clues about his homosexuality throughout his poems (something Walt Whitman, one of his key influences, was known to do in his own work). However, there is no overt evidence to support this, and some argue that Hughes was, if anything, asexual and uninterested in sex.

Despite his early and long-term interest in socialism and his visit to the Soviet Union, Hughes denied being a communist when called to testify by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He then distanced himself from communism and socialism, and was thus estranged from the political left that had often supported him. His work dealt less and less with political considerations after the mid-1950s as a result, and when he compiled the poems for his 1959 collection Selected Poems, he excluded most of his more politically-focused work from his youth.

Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and entered the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on May 22, 1967 to undergo surgery to treat the disease. Complications arose during the procedure, and Hughes passed away at the age of 65. He was cremated, and his ashes interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where the floor bears a design based on his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers , including a line from the poem inscribed on the floor.

Hughes turned his poetry outward at a time in the early 20th century when Black artists were increasingly turning inward, writing for an insular audience. Hughes wrote about Black history and the Black experience, but he wrote for a general audience, seeking to convey his ideas in emotional, easily-understood motifs and phrases that nevertheless had power and subtlety behind them.

Hughes incorporated the rhythms of modern speech in Black neighborhoods and of jazz and blues music, and he included characters of "low" morals in his poems, including alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes, whereas most Black literature sought to disavow such characters because of a fear of proving some of the worst racist assumptions. Hughes felt strongly that showing all aspects of Black culture was part of reflecting life and refused to apologize for what he called the "indelicate" nature of his writing.

• Als, Hilton. “The Elusive Langston Hughes.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner.
• Ward, David C. “Why Langston Hughes Still Reigns as a Poet for the Unchampioned.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 22 May 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-langston-hughes-still-reigns-poet-unchampioned-180963405/.
• Johnson, Marisa, et al. “Women in the Life of Langston Hughes.” US History Scene, http://ushistoryscene.com/article/women-and-hughes/.
• McKinney, Kelsey. “Langston Hughes Wrote a Children's Book in 1955.” Vox, Vox, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/4/2/8335251/langston-hughes-jazz-book.
• Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.
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Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten . Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes’s debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar , Carl Sandburg , and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay , Jean Toomer , and Countee Cullen , Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.

The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes

differed from most of his predecessors among black poets… 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... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965);  Simple Stakes a Claim  (Rinehart, 1957);  Simple Takes a Wife  (Simon & Schuster, 1953);  Simple Speaks His Mind  (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949  (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps , edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

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Poems & Poets

Langston Hughes 101

Understanding a poet of the people, for the people..

BY Benjamin Voigt

Few American artists loomed larger in the 20th century than Langston Hughes . He rode steamships to West Africa, toured the American South, traveled to Spain to cover the Civil War, rode the Trans-Siberian Railway, and saw his own reputation shift from Harlem Renaissance star in the 1920s to Communist activist poet in the 1930s to public figure in the 1960s. His literary output was similarly prodigious and unprecedented, and he was one of the first black poets to make a living solely from writing. He wrote novels, plays, short stories, films, librettos, children’s verse, newspaper columns, translations, and memoirs and edited several important anthologies. But most of all, he remained a poet. In his poems, he explored social conscience and class difference with lyric beauty and music. He managed to capture, in deceptively simple poems, the wide range of African American experience—from the horrors of the Jim Crow South to the be-bop hustle of Harlem life—and significantly expanded the vocabulary of American poetry. These poems, arranged in order of publication date, represent just a small cross section of his varied work.

“ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ” Hughes wrote this poem, one of his best known and most celebrated, on the back of an envelope when he just 17 years old. As he recounts in his autobiography The Big Sea , he was traveling to visit his father when his train crossed the Mississippi, and he “began to think what that river … meant to Negroes in the past.” In the poem, the river offers both pain and the possibility of identity: it connects Hughes not only to the history of slavery but also to a much greater African American ancestry—one that he can trace back, along a series of rivers, to the very cradle of civilization. This short composition introduces many of his enduring themes, and it brought him onto the national stage when it was published by W.E.B. Du Bois in the Crisis .

“ I, Too ” Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman were great early influences on Hughes, and this poem from his first book, Weary Blues (1926), might be read as a reckoning with these literary forebears. “I, Too” repurposes Whitman’s demotic language and democratic I to do what Whitman could not: imagine a truly equal place at the table for “the darker brother.” Like many of his Harlem Renaissance counterparts, Hughes focused on just this sort of imagination. By giving voice to black America, he shows, as he puts it here, “how beautiful” black experience is.

“ Mother to Son ” In this famous dramatic monologue , a mother begins her motivational speech by explaining, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” By putting readers in the position of her son, Hughes allows us to more directly hear and identify with her message, while his use of extended metaphor prevents her struggles from becoming sentimental.

Blues The four hard-luck poems in this suite come from Hughes’s second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), which the black press criticized for his use of dialect and focus on lower class culture. Hughes may have been the first to bring the blues to poetry, as you can see in these poems, but as a pioneering artist, he endured criticism throughout his career. He was attacked by academics for being simplistic, by the right for being a Communist, by the left for declaiming Communism, and later by black militants for not being radical enough. In his famous 1926 essay “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain ,” Hughes wrote, “the road for the serious black artist … is most certainly rocky.” Yet he managed to find a large audience, starting in the 1920s, without compromising his primary ambition: to make art of, for, and about “the low-down folks, the so-called common element” who “accept what beauty is their own without question.”

The Quick and the Dead First published in Poetry in 1931, this diverse group of poems represents Hughes’s range of styles and concerns. “ Lover’s Return ” sings the relationship blues with acute attention to love’s toll on women. The staccato ending of “ Sylvester’s Dying Bed ” recalls Emily Dickinson . “ Sailor ” is Hughes’s take on Imagism . And the matter-of-fact grimness of “ Dying Beast ” prepares us for the irreverent metaphysics of “ God ,” in which the titular deity insists that it’s “Better to be human / Than God—and lonely.”

“ Harlem ” Made famous years later by Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun , this short poem is part of Hughes’s long sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). Combining be-bop rhythms and modernist poetics, Montage is a symphony of riffs, solos, and skipped beats, a lyric masterpiece with its ear to the concrete of Hughes’s beloved Harlem. The “dream deferred” here suggests a yearning for a number of things: individual achievement, the promise of Harlem, and America’s supposed equality. But the progression of the poem’s questions also reflects a growing frustration, one that, as the final line suggests, could explode into violence, as it did in the Harlem riots in 1943 and 1964.

“ Blues in Stereo ” The stereo of the title refers not just to the uncanny doublings of technologies—the TV that “keeps on snowing” or “the horns” on “LPs that wonder / how the every got that way”—but also to the score that runs down the poem’s right hand margin. Part of his book-length epic Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), Hughes intended the piece to be performed literally in stereo, with his words accompanied by blues and African drumming. Other pieces in the book feature mambo, gospel, and German lieder. Though Hughes never saw the project staged, its multimedia ambitions, dense allusions , and shout-outs to black cultural icons anticipated, way back in 1961, everything from hip-hop to remixes to the Internet’s metamodern Zeitgeist.

“ Remember ” Composed in 1930, “Remember” was not published until 2009, when it was discovered, along with “ I look at the world ” and “ You and your whole race ,” written in pencil in the back of Hughes’s copy of An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry . Like much of Hughes’s verse of the early 1930s, the poem is a product of its political climate, a period of economic downturn when Hughes visited the Scottsboro boys in prison and traveled to the Soviet Union. More than 80 years later, its anger remains remarkably powerful and unfortunately relevant. In an era of mass incarceration and police violence, one can still argue, as Hughes does here, that the “days of bondage” have not passed: whether you’re in the Carolinas, Maine, or Africa, whiteness still wields “unscrupulous power.” Hughes did essential work over the course of his career to make us see “with eyes no longer blind,” but more work remains to make the world that Hughes envisioned.

But that’s just the beginning. You can read Langston Hughes’s thoughts on poetry in his own words, in his essays “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain ” (1926), “ Jazz as Communication ” (1956), and “ 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry ” (1965).

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Langston Hughes: Poems, Biography, and Timeline of his early career

Contents of this path:.

• 1 2022-01-05T15:17:55-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues" (full text) (1926) 12 plain 2024-02-10T07:34:48-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2023-05-07T09:35:02-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Fine Clothes to the Jew" (1927) (Full Text) 6 plain 2024-06-20T15:45:46-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-09T13:48:19-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Poems by Langston Hughes in "The New Negro" (1925) 1 plain 2022-01-09T13:48:19-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:14:17-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921) 8 plain 2024-01-09T11:08:46-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:13:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Aunt Sue's Stories" (1921) 3 plain 2022-07-02T08:31:28-04:00 07/01/1921 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:08:09-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Song for a Banjo Dance" (1922) 4 plain 2024-01-09T10:53:16-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:16:44-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "When Sue Wears Red" (1923) 2 plain 2022-07-02T08:29:32-04:00 02/01/1923 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-19T14:25:59-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Dreams" (1923) 1 plain 2022-07-19T14:25:59-04:00 05/01/1923 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T11:52:37-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Last Feast of Belshazzar" (1923) 2 plain 2024-05-02T13:47:51-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:10:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Winter Moon" (1923) 3 plain 2024-01-09T11:00:40-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-04T12:23:14-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Song for a Suicide" (1924) 1 plain 2022-08-04T12:23:14-04:00 05/01/1924 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:40:49-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Johannesburg Mines" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:40:49-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:39:13-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Steel Mills" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:39:13-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:31:34-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To Certain Intellectuals" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:31:34-04:00 01/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T12:55:18-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" (1925) 2 plain 2022-07-11T12:56:07-04:00 12/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:16:06-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To the Black Beloved" (1925) 4 plain 2024-01-26T16:59:49-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T14:57:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Love Song for Lucinda" (1926) 1 plain 2022-07-11T14:57:12-04:00 05/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:29:14-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Young Bride" (1925) 5 plain 2024-02-10T07:39:51-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T11:09:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Poppy Flower" (1925) 1 plain 2022-07-11T11:09:50-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:32:10-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Summer Night" (1925) 4 plain 2022-07-11T12:42:15-04:00 12/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T13:00:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "A Song to a Negro Wash-woman" (1925) 1 plain 2022-07-11T13:00:50-04:00 01/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-05T16:33:06-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To Beauty" (1926) 1 plain 2022-08-05T16:33:06-04:00 10/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-05T15:52:56-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Ring" (1926) 1 plain 2022-08-05T15:52:56-04:00 04/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T07:08:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Being Old" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T07:08:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-10T08:39:01-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Ma Lord" (1927) 2 plain 2024-05-06T11:49:26-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:41:36-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "For an Indian Screen" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:41:36-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:43:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Lincoln Monument" (1927) 2 plain 2024-03-05T11:45:02-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T12:33:07-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "I Thought it was Tangiers I Wanter" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T12:33:07-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:44:23-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Day" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:44:23-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:42:34-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Passing Love" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:42:34-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T07:08:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Freedom Seeker" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T07:08:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T09:26:11-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Montmartre Beggar Woman" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T09:26:11-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-10T08:49:52-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Tapestry" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-10T08:49:52-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1

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• 1 media/Langston Hughes Photo 1936 Carl Van Vechten_thumb.jpg 2022-01-21T09:31:56-05:00 Langston Hughes photo 1936 Carl Van Vechten 1 Langston Hughes photo 1936 Carl Van Vechten media/Langston Hughes Photo 1936 Carl Van Vechten.jpg plain 2022-01-21T09:31:56-05:00
• 1 media/langston hughes 1923_thumb.jpg 2022-07-21T10:50:03-04:00 Langston Hughes Photo 1923 1 Photo of Langston Hughes taken for Robert Kerlin's "Negro Poets and their Poems" (1923) media/langston hughes 1923.jpg plain 2022-07-21T10:50:03-04:00

Poet Biographies

The Life and Times of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a prolific poet, novelist, and playwright whose work was marked by a passionate commitment to social justice and the celebration of Black culture, merging traditional African American rhythms with modernist experimentation.

Langston Hughes had a five-decade career in which he wrote short stories , poems, plays, and books for children, as well as newspaper columns, and novels . He is considered today as one of the, if not the, most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance , one of the most influential American poets and predecessors for modern black poets. His work implemented a fusion of traditional African-American rhythms with modernist experimentation. A pioneer in his field, Hughes’ was responsible for the emergence of jazz poetry, a form of writing that mimics jazz music. Thematically, Hughes would consistently touch on the notion of identity, discrimination, and social justice.

About Langston Hughes

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 8 Influence from other Poets
• 9 The Harlem Renaissance
• 10 Jazz Poetry
• 11 Langston Hughes FAQs
• Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901.
• His most famous poem is often cited as ‘ Negro Speaks of Rivers ‘.
• Langston Hughes became a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
• Hughes wrote poems , plays, stories, children’s books, and novels.
• Hughes died at 65 after complications from prostate surgery.

Interesting Facts

• Hughes initially went to engineering school.
• Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union and had a fascination with Communism.
• He also went to West Africa and throughout Europe.
• Hughes published his autobiography at 28 years old.
• His home is now a nationally registered landmark.

Famous Poems

• ‘Negro Speaks of Rivers ’ is often cited as Langston Hughes’ most famous poem and he only wrote it when he was seventeen years old. It is told from the perceptive of an old black man who has traveled the world and seen an incredible amount of history play out on riverbanks. He has seen everything from the building of the pyramids to Abraham Lincoln.
• ‘ Montage of a Dream Deferred ’ ,  also commonly known as ‘Harlem’ is a book-length poem. The text speaks about the lives of Harlem residents who are not experiencing the “American Dream”, but instead are having their dreams deferred. The speaker questions the state of the world, where his dreams, and those of his neighbors, went. 
• ‘ I, Too, Sing America ’  is one of the shortest poems on this list. In it, the speaker explores why he’s treated differently, as a black man, then others are. He looks to the future and presents the reader with a more hopeful vision of his life. At some point, he’s going to be treated as he deserves.
• ‘ Mother to Son ‘  was first published in December of 1922 in the magazine, Crisis.  This incredibly moving poem uses the metaphor of a staircase, and the narrative voice of a mother, to describe for a young man the troubles ahead.
• ‘ Let America Be America Again ’   also focuses on the American dream. In the poem, Hughes speaker wonders if the idealized dream of America that he used to believe in even exists at all. It might be possible for it to return at some point, but not now. There is too much wrong with America for the “dream” to be a reality.

Explore more Langston Hughes poems .

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901. His ancestry was a complicated one due to the fact that his paternal great-grandmothers were both enslaved and his great-grandfathers were slave owners. Hughes’s parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston divorced soon after his birth. James left the family and traveled throughout South America. Hughes’ mother spent a great deal of time traveling, seeking out some form of employment. This meant that Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother.

Most of Hughes’ childhood was spent in Lawrence, Kansas. It was here his grandmother instilled in him a pride for his race and deep care for those struggling around him. When his grandmother died he lived with family friends and then later with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois.

A short time later he was attending Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio. It is known that he began writing when he was very young. He was named the class poet in grammar school and in High School, he wrote for the newspaper. His first short stories, play, and poetry was formed during this time as well.

Hughes graduated from high school and traveled to Mexico where he lived with his father for a short time. It was his goal to acquire some kind of financial assistance, or at least support, for his further education at Columbia University. He intended to become a writer. Hughes’s father did not support his plan but after negotiation, he did receive some assistance.

Literary Career

While at Columbia he was an average student and became part of the Harlem Renaissance. This period was known for its explosion of artistic and intellectuality, centered around the African American community in Harlem, New York. He did not remain at Columbia long though, leaving in 1922 due to racial prejudice among the students and teachers.

In 1923 he spent six months on a ship traveling to West Africa and Europe, including Paris and England. Hughes returned to America in 1924 and moved in with his mother in Washington, D.C. He found employment as a personal assistant at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The position proved to be too much of a time constraint on his writing and he quit working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel.

Writing Career and Relationships

It was around this period of time that Hughes met the poet Vachel Lindsey who publicized his work. Up until this point, Hughes’ writing had only appeared in magazines. His first book, and collection,  The Weary Blues,  appeared soon after in 1926. This work won first prize in a literary magazine competition and supplied him with the scholarship he needed to continue his studies. It was followed by  Fine Clothes to the Jew  in 1927.

In 1924, Hughes met Carl van Vechten at a party he attended in Harlem. They kicked off a long-lasting intellectual relationship, corresponding via letters for over forty years. Van Vechten became one of his primary influences, helping Hughes on his path to literary greatness.

In 1926, Hughes produced one of his greatest pieces of work ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’. This essay was intended as a sincere depiction of the ups and downs of the lives of working-class black people in America during the 1920s. In the essay, Hughes expresses his indifference towards how white people viewed him “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs.”

Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University in Chester Country, Pennsylvania. It was known as a historically black university and he attended at the same time as the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall.

Hughes completed his studies and graduated with a B.A. in 1929. At this point, he returned to New York and lived primarily in Harlem for the rest of his life. His first novel was published this same year titled,  Not Without Laughter.  The book was his first commercial success and validated his own beliefs in himself.

Throughout the 30s he traveled the United States lecturing. His first collection of short stories appeared in 1934. Two years later what is now his most popular poem,  ‘ Let American Be America Again ’  was published in  Esquire.  It was focused on the disadvantages of the lower class and the hope for the American Dream.

In 1940, he published an autobiography of the first part of his life It was titled,  The Big Sea.  He was also working for the  Chicago Defender  writing about a comical character he named Jesse B. The decade also saw Hughes contribute lyrics to a Broadway musical and begin teaching creative writing at Atlanta University. At the beginning of 1951, he published ‘ Harlem (What happens to a dream deferred?’ ).”

Langston Hughes died in May of 1967 in New York City from complications due to prostate cancer. His ashes were interred at the entrance of the Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Additionally, his home was registered as a historic landmark.

Influence from other Poets

Langston Hughes was notably influenced by writers such as  Paul Laurence Dunbar ,  Carl Sandburg , and  Walt Whitman . As part of the Harlem Renaissance, he has served as a major influence on generations of poets who have come after him and looked to the movement for inspiration.

Jessie Fauset also played a vital role in nurturing the talent of Hughes, as she became a mentor for many up-and-coming black writers during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the most notable of these were  Countee Cullen ,  Claude McKay ,  Jean Toomer,  and  Anne Spencer .

Influence and relations with other poets weren’t always on the positive end. Langston Hughes did find some displeasure aimed towards him from up-and-coming writers as time moved on. As racial integration began to happen, there was a graduation of a new wave of black poets. Younger poets criticized Hughes for his outdated view of the societal landscape. Hughes himself lashed back at the new generation, and in particular James Baldwin, considering his work to be angry, prideless, and somewhat tasteless.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement surrounding mainly African American poets, and novelists in the late 1920s, that continued into the 1930s. Langston Hughes emerged as a spearhead for this movement with his work that addressed racial consciousness, but unlike the work of previous, and later poets, it was focused on removing hate and resentment. Scholars believe that his work  The Nation  became a manifesto for the movement, and other writers followed in his footsteps.

Jazz Poetry

Hughes was not only a leader and inspiration for fellow black poets, but he also was a pioneer of his craft, pushing new boundaries with his poetic style . He is known for being the founder of ‘jazz poetry’. Jazz poetry runs throughout Langston Hughes’ work and mimics the rhythmic elements of jazz music, with the intent to be read in such a way. He would implement techniques such as jive language, and syncopated rhythms, and would even alternate his phrasing to mirror the creative and flexible nature of jazz music itself.

Langston Hughes FAQs

‘ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ‘ is arguably Langston Hughes’ most well-known poem from his collection of quality work. Even though Hughes was only in his teenage years when the poem was written, its excellent description of black cultural history is way beyond his years.

A powerful quote by Langston Hughes that has lasted the test of time is his quote about dreams. He says “ Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” One interpretation of the quote is that true happiness in life is not attainable without having goals, a purpose, or dreams, to aim for.

The Ways of the White Folk is one of Langston Hughes’ most celebrated collections of short stories . Published in 1934, it is a group of 14 short stories about the lives of black people colliding.

Langston Hughes was most popular, and in his literary prime, during the 1920s. He was a key part of the Harlem Renaissance , a movement that flowered many black intellectuals, poets, and novelists.

Langston Hughes was famous for his vital role in bringing the spotlight onto black poetry, novels , and other intellectual pursuits. During the 1920s he wrote a number of poems, short stories , novels , and essays that highlighted the African American experience, showcasing both the hardships and the joys of being part of black culture.

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Green, William. "The Life and Times of Langston Hughes". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/langston-hughes/biography/ . Accessed 6 September 2024.

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Langston Hughes: The People's Poet

Sitting at his typewriter, a pencil in hand, Langston Hughes looks out just beyond the frame as though poised to capture and crystallize a verse still forming. The portrait, photographed by Louis H. Draper, gives only a glimpse of the writer who “simply liked people,” as Arnold Rampersad writes in the introduction to “Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.” “If he was lonely in essential ways, his main response to his pain was to create a body of art that others could admire and applaud.” 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, it was the writer's many years in Harlem that would come to characterize his work. There he focused squarely on the lives of working-class black Americans, delicately dismantling clichés and, in doing so, arriving at a genuine portrayal of the people he knew best. 

But Hughes’s body of work, steeped as it was in stories of everyday life, was not without its critics. Hughes's writing, especially his use of the fictional character Jesse B. Semple (a.k.a. “Simple”) portrayed what critics saw as an unattractive view of black American life. Commenting on the writer's poetry collection, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,”​ EstaceGay asserted that “our aim ought to be [to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning and malicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves.”​ What such criticisms miss, however, is that Hughes's eloquently spare and humble verse was never disparaging. In telling stories of those he encountered, Hughes brought to light not only the drudgery but also the determination alive in Harlem.

Writing in Black World, one reviewer captured the popularity of Simple - a character who “lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears - and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives.” Hughes's beloved poem “I, Too” underlines both the empathy the writer showed for the working class and the quiet resistance these figures had come to represent. “Tomorrow, / I'll be at the table / When company comes … They'll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed” Hughes’s unnamed first person is far from a passive observer of racism and its ruptures. Here is an individual sure of him or herself and confident in a justice still unrealized.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Estate of Louis H. Draper

Indeed, the subtleties and singularities of Hughes’s characters set apart the writer’s work. Angela Flournoy echoes this sentiment in her review of “Not Without Laughter,” Hughes's debut novel .  “Hughes accesses the universal - how all of us love and dream and laugh and cry - by staying faithful to the particulars of his characters and their way of life.” In the novel, themes of migration have particular resonance. It is the fascinating, intimate character studies Hughes offers which anchor an otherwise mercurial world. So, too, are the characters in his work resoundingly robust. By Hughes's own account, Simple “tells me his tales, mostly in high humor, but sometimes with a pain in his soul as sharp as the occasional hurt of that bunion on his right foot. Sometimes, as the old blues says, Simple might be ‘laughing to keep from crying.”

Here, then, are characters endowed with a depth akin to the river Hughes references in the much-beloved poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In the poem's opening stanza the still unknown narrator recounts “I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in veins. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” One imagines from these lines that Simple, and other working-class Americans like him, knew comparable depths and, in finding their strength, realized the broader continuities between past and present trials.

Winold Reiss, "Langston Hughes," National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

What is inspiring about Hughes’s work, is that despite the hardship and hopelessness that colored his poetry and prose, he maintained a striking, confident assurance that a brighter future awaits. Typifying that impulse is Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.” In one of the final stanzas, Hughes writes, “O, let America be America again - / The land that never has been yet - / And yet must be - the land where every man is free.”

Hughes knew the struggle of the working class intimately, indeed, he devoted much of the poem to it, while assuring readers that the future is a just one. This counterfactual history seems, at times, to be at odds with the stories of bigotry that emerge in Hughes's work in ways big and small. This hope, though, appears to derive less from mere idealism and more from the purview of a writer who, more than anything else, loved people and hoped - believed, even - that their work would not be in vain.

Indeed, it was Hughes's realistic idealism that made him the celebrated writer he is today. As raw as racism once was and as traumatizing as it still is, bringing to light the stories of the oppressed seems an enduring antidote - a phenomenon Hughes knew well. The writer was resolute in listening to the stories of the working class and telling those stories in a language they understood. By so doing, he reflected the beauty and boundlessness of the Harlem he experienced every day.

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Langston Hughes summary

Langston Hughes , (born Feb. 1, 1902, Joplin, Mo., U.S.—died May 22, 1967, New York, N.Y.), U.S. poet and writer. He published the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” when he was 19, briefly attended Columbia University, and worked on an Africa-bound freighter. His literary career was launched when Hughes, working as a busboy, presented his poems to Vachel Lindsay as he dined. Hughes’s poetry collections include The Weary Blues (1926) and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). His later The Panther and the Lash (1967) reflects black anger and militancy. Among his other works are short stories (including “The Ways of White Folks,” 1934), autobiographies, many works for the stage, anthologies, and translations of poetry by Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. His well-known comic character Jesse B. Semple, called Simple, appeared in his newspaper columns.

10 Essential Langston Hughes Poems, Including “Harlem” and “I, Too”

Langston Hughes’ poetry continues to capture the heart of America with its lyrical realism and everyday subject matter.

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Five years after his first poem was published, Langston Hughes wrote in The Nation , “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” He abided by these words throughout his career, centering everyday lives of Black people like himself, uncommon subject matter at a time when legal segregation reigned. Lyrical yet direct, Hughes’ poems made him a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance and remain influential today.

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

His writing career began the year after he graduated from high school with the 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , followed in 1926. Throughout his work, Hughes portrayed working-class African Americans in a range of common experiences, both positive and negative. The New York City transplant was among the first poets to adapt jazz rhythms and dialect on the page. So groundbreaking was his work that Hughes wasn’t convinced he could earn a living as a writer until 1930, ultimately becoming one of the first Black Americans to do so.

Some of his most famous poems include “I, Too,” “Dreams,” and “Harlem,” which influenced playwright Lorraine Hansberry and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. , among many others. Beyond poetry, Hughes wrote novels like 1930’s Not Without Laughter , short stories, the autobiographies The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956) , and plays like Mulatto . He even worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 for several American newspapers and as a columnist for the Chicago Defender .

In 1967, the well-traveled writer died of cancer in his mid-60s, yet his legacy has endured. His brownstone home in Harlem became a historic landmark in 1982, schools bear his name, and most of all, his poetry still resonates. Here are 10 essential poems by Langston Hughes that capture of the heart of America.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921)

Written when he was 17 years old on a train to Mexico City to see his father, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was Hughes’ first published poem. It appeared in the June 1921 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and received critical acclaim. The opening lines show a soul deeper than his age: “I’ve known rivers / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The style honors that of his poetic influences Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, as well as the voice of African American spirituals.

“Mother to Son” (1922)

With recitations from notable figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and actor Viola Davis , “Mother to Son” was published in the December 1922 issue of The Crisis . The 20-line poem traces a mother’s words to her child about their difficult life journey using the analogy of stairs with “tacks” and “splinters” in it. But ultimately she encourages her son to forge ahead, as she leads by example: “So boy, don’t you turn back / Don’t you set down on the steps / ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard / Don’t you fall now / For I’se still goin’, honey / I’se still climbin’ / And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

“Dreams” (1922)

One of several Hughes poems about dreams and fittingly titled, this 1922 poem appeared in World Tomorrow . “Dreams,” an eight-line poem, remains a popular inspirational quote. It partially reads: “Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.”

“The Weary Blues” (1925)

The weary blues by langston hughes.

“The Weary Blues” follows an African American pianist playing in Harlem on Lenox Avenue. It starts off sounding like he’s completely carefree but ends: “The stars went out and so did the moon / The singer stopped playing and went to bed / While the Weary Blues echoed through his head / He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”

After it won a contest in Opportunity magazine, Hughes called it his “lucky poem.” Sure enough, the next year, his first poetry collection was published by Knopf with the same title. Hughes was 24.

“Po’ Boy Blues” (1926)

As one of four Hughes poems that appeared in the November 1926 issue of Poetry Magazine , as well as his collection The Weary Blues , this poem feels music-like with its stanza and rhymes. The final verse reads: “Weary, weary / Weary early in de morn. / Weary, weary / Early, early in de morn. / I’s so wear / I wish I’d never been born.”

“Let America Be America Again” (1936)

First published in the July 1936 issue of Esquire magazine , “Let America Be America Again” highlights how class plays such a crucial role in the ability to realize the promises of the American dream. The three opening stanzas are each followed by a parenthetical representing the cast-off realities for the lower class, such as: “Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free / (America never was America to me.)”

“Life is Fine” (1949)

Perseverance pushes through all the odds—even suicide attempts—in “Life is Fine.” Broken into three sections, the first part talks about jumping into a cold river: “If that water hadn’t a-been so cold / I might’ve sunk and died.” And the second about going to the top of a 16-floor building: “If it hadn’t a-been so high/ I might’ve jumped and died.” But in the third section, it says, “But for livin’ I was born” before ending with “Life is fine! / Fine as wine! / Life is fine!”

“I, Too” (1945)

In “I, Too,” Hughes addresses segregation head-on: “I am the darker brother / They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes.” Despite being hidden in the back, he continues to “laugh,” “eat well,” and “grow strong.” The subject looks to a future of equality, emphatically declaring “I, too, am America.”

“Harlem” (1951)

Perhaps his most influential poem, “Harlem” starts with the line “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” The poem digs into the dichotomy of the idea of the American dream juxtaposed with the reality of being in a marginalized community. Hughes’ words inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry ’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun about a struggling Black family, and Martin Luther King Jr. referenced it in a number of his sermons and speeches.

“Harlem” was actually conceived as part of a book-length poem, Montage o f Dream Deferred . With more than 90 poems strung together in a musical beat, the full volume paints a full picture of life in Harlem during the Jim Crow era , most questioned in this poem’s final line, “Or does it explode?”

“Brotherly Love” (1956)

Despite the fact that Hughes was more of a household name than King at the time, the poet wrote “Brotherly Love” about the civil rights activist and the Montgomery bus boycott , which starts: “In line of what my folks say in Montgomery / In line of what they’re teaching about love / When I reach out my hand, will you take it — / Or cut it off and leave a nub above?” It was yet another work in which Hughes tackled the idea of racial equality.

Adrienne directs the daily news operation and content production for Biography.com. She joined the staff in October 2022 and most recently worked as an editor for Popular Mechanics , Runner’s World , and Bicycling . Adrienne has served as editor-in-chief of two regional print magazines, and her work has won several awards, including the Best Explanatory Journalism award from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. Her current working theory is that people are the point of life, and she’s fascinated by everyone who (and every system that) creates our societal norms. When she’s not behind the news desk, find her hiking, working on her latest cocktail project, or eating mint chocolate chip ice cream. 

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