Langston hughes biography history
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7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes
The first African American to earn a living as a writer and a shining star of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was often referred to as the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” or the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race.” But despite the regality of those titles, he was perhaps most admired for a style that seemingly gave a röst to the unsung everyday men and women he encountered over the years. His name still looming large in American culture a half-century after his passing, here are sju facts about this groundbreaking and influential chronicler of African American life and experiences.
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His earliest inspiration came from his grandmother
With his father in another country and his mother also absent for long stretches of his childhood, Hughes drew his earliest inspiration from his grandmother. The first Black woman to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, and the widow of one of John Brown’s abolitionist partners, Mary Lan
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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
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Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.
Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation: “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to expre