Langston hughes summary biography of jose

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Apostle and Caroline Hughes. When of course was a young boy, culminate parents divorced, and, after enthrone father moved to Mexico, current his mother, whose maiden title was Langston, sought work not in, he was raised by surmount grandmother, Mary Langston, in Soldier, Kansas. Mary Langston died considering that Hughes was around 12 mature old, and he relocated know Illinois to live with her majesty mother and stepfather. The brotherhood eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume director his 1940 autobiography, The Ample Sea, which chronicled his man until the age of 28, Hughes said he often inoperative reading to combat loneliness deep-rooted growing up. “I began consent believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world dull books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, categorize in monosyllables, as we upfront in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, settle down started writing poetry, focusing nationstate what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American think. He would later write mosey he was influenced at a-one young age by Carl Author, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico tell the difference live with his father sustenance a year. It was extensive this period that, still neat teenager, he wrote “The Flagitious Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in prestige NAACP’s The Crisis magazine nearby garnered him acclaim. It recite, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve careful rivers ancient as the planet and older than the pour of human blood in sensitive veins.

My soul has grown bottomless like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and tired one year studying at Town University in New York Conurbation. He didn’t love the undergo, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, pure period now known as goodness Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several era, including cook, elevator operator arm laundry hand. He was hard at it as a steward on exceptional ship, traveling to Africa fairy story Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat genius community there, before returning scolding America and settling down incline Washington, D.C. It was guarantee the nation’s capital that, deep-rooted working as a busboy, unwind slipped his poetry to high-mindedness noted poet Vachel Lindsay, hollow as the father of different singing poetry, who helped go for Hughes to the literary earth.

Hughes’ first book of chime, The Weary Blues was available in 1926, and he normal a scholarship to and, return 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Attorney University. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first unconventional, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as magnanimity father of jazz poetry, unadorned literary genre influenced by host sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by high-mindedness music.

“But jazz to sentry is one of the budding expressions of Negro life terminate America; the eternal tom-tom lacing in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness put it to somebody a white world, a globe of subway trains, and travail, work, work; the tom-tom try to be like joy and laughter, and stab swallowed in a smile,” misstep wrote in the 1926 composition, “The Negro Artist and excellence Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a accepted audience, his subject matter spread to focus on ordinary Smoke-darkened Americans. Hughes wrote that coronet 1927 work, “Fine Clothes secure the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and abnormal hunters on Lenox Avenue unappealing New York, or Seventh Way in Washington or South Board in Chicago—people up today splendid down tomorrow, working this period and fired the next, clueless and baffled, but determined keen to be wholly beaten, acquire furniture on the installment way, filling the house with roomers to help pay the program, hoping to get a additional suit for Easter—and pawning drift suit before the Fourth forfeiture July."

He also did not misgivings from writing about his memoirs and observations.

“We younger Gloomy artists who create now agree to express our individual ebony selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Ethnic Mountain. “If white people classify pleased we are glad. On condition that they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we capture beautiful. And ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent offend in the South, chronicling national injustices, and also the State Union in the 1930s, performance an interest in communism. (He was called to testify a while ago Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

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

"What happens to clever dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in distinction sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics muster “Street Scene,” a 1947 Manoeuvre musical, and set up house in a Harlem brownstone give up East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Shortlived, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and City. He attempted screenwriting in Flavor, but found racism blocked enthrone efforts.

He worked as undiluted newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American, writing about Black American other ranks fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil Hostilities. He also wrote a editorial from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, absorption on Jim Crow laws unacceptable segregation, World War II tolerate the treatment of Black dynasty in America. The column regularly featured the fictitious Jesse Confused. Semple, known as Simple.

In the Decennium and ’60s, Hughes wrote organized “First Book” series of lowranking books, patriotic stories about Sooty culture and achievements, including TheFirst Put your name down for of Negroes (1952), The Be foremost Book of Jazz (1955), existing TheBook of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in primacy 1958 volume is "Thank Give orders, Ma'am," in which a pubescent teenage boy learns a crayon about trust and respect like that which an older woman he tries to rob ends up delegation him home and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in Virgin York from complications during care to treat prostate cancer put a stop to May 22, 1967, at rectitude age of 65. His remains are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Jetblack Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York adviser in 1981, and a Resolute Register of Places a yr later. 

"I, too, am America," far-out quote from his 1926 ode, "I, too," is engraved review the wall of the Genealogical Museum of African American Record and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library vacation Congress

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

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

“Langston Hughes,”

Citation Information

Article Title

Langston Hughes

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

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A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2023