Langston Hughes

Poet

• Born: February 1, 1902
• Birthplace: Joplin, Missouri
• Died: May 22, 1967
• Place of death: New York, New York

Writer

Hughes was one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed African American writers of the twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, he broke with traditional black writers who crafted uplifting stories about the lives of black people by presenting African Americans as they lived, on the fringes of white society. He wrote about common people in ordinary jobs, people who experienced just as much joy and pain as did those in the privileged classes.

Areas of achievement: Literature; Poetry

Early Life

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, to parents of mixed race. His mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, was from an activist family respected in both the black and white communities. She was a creative woman who taught, acted, and wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, had studied law, but had been denied an appearance before the Oklahoma Law Review Board to obtain a license. Ubiquitous racism in the United States led James to settle in Mexico, at first with his family, then alone after his wife and son returned to live with Carrie’s mother, Mary Langston. Because Carrie could not find even menial work in Joplin, she had to travel widely, picking up employment whenever she could. Hughes lived variously with his maternal grandmother, his mother, his father, and family friends Mary and James Reed. His childhood, therefore, consisted of being frequently uprooted and shuttled among relatives and friends, and he developed feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and desolation. His years with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, had a profound influence on him because she passed on her love of literature and sense of social justice. She was a cultured woman who encouraged Hughes’s reading and writing. Hughes immersed himself in books, a near-obsession that did not alleviate his isolation but helped with the loneliness.

In 1912, when his grandmother died, Hughes moved in with the Reeds. He lived with them for two years before joining his mother and her new husband in Cleveland, Ohio. Most of his high school friends there were Jewish, the children of immigrant families steeped in socialist traditions. These families were much more welcoming than he found most Ohioans. He became familiar with socialist causes and leaders, such as Eugene V. Debs, and attended many speaker forums.

Hughes graduated from Cleveland Central High in 1920. Spending the summers of 1919 and 1920 with his father in Mexico City, Hughes grew to detest the man for his bias against people of color. His anger at his father led him to contemplate suicide, but thoughts of potential adventures, such as climbing to the top of a volcano, attending a bullfight, graduating, and marrying, kept him alive.

Hughes’s relationship with his father was further strained because James sought to dissuade him from pursuing a life as a writer, urging him to go to an international school and learn a more manly trade. They finally settled on an arrangement wherein James would help finance Hughes’s studies at Columbia University in New York City as long as he studied engineering instead of literature. He enrolled in the fall of 1921, by which time he already had published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Hughes’s path was set as a writer of African American life.

Although he maintained good grades, Hughes found little to like about Columbia. He felt like an outsider among his privileged classmates. Scholarship was not as important to him as exploring the art venues and the jazz clubs of Harlem, recording the everyday events in the lives of regular people and writing prolifically. He attended lectures in the city and studied what he wanted at his own pace, leaving the university after a year. He obtained a number of odd jobs, including busing tables, working at a fish and oyster house, laundering clothes, cooking, and serving as a steward on an ocean liner headed down the coast of Africa. Before embarking on this voyage, Hughes threw all of his treasured books into the Atlantic Ocean off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, hoping to symbolically leave behind thoughts of his father and mother and reminders of poverty and racism, to begin anew without the burden of old mistakes and grievances.

The African experience reenforced Hughes’s determination to celebrate his blackness. He loved the variety of the continent, with its green hills, dark-skinned people, and tall palm trees—everything seeming wild and lovely. Near the end of the journey, he spent a few months in Paris, then returned to the United States late in 1924. He began work as a clerk for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History but quit to be a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. It was there that his life changed again. Poet Vachel Lindsay was dining in the restaurant one night and Hughes boldly dropped off a few sheets of his poetry beside Lindsay’s plate. By morning, the press knew that Lindsay had “discovered ” an African American busboy poet. It was not long before Hughes was well known in Washington, D.C., and New York and had met many influential people. He became part of the group of talented writers, artists, and musicians who embodied the Harlem Renaissance.

Life’s Work

In 1924, Charlotte Mason became Hughes’s patron, giving him two happy years of financial security and encouragement. She oversaw the publication of his first book, The Weary Blues (1925), and introduced him to such cultural wonders as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall. They began to grow apart, however, when their differing expectations for black writers and black writing became apparent. Mason saw African Americans as more closely connected to the primitive world, in tune with a mysticism that had been polluted by whites. Hughes loved what he had seen of Africa but defined himself as an American and saw more relevance and meaning in the gritty, everyday reality of urban life. Hughes and Mason parted ways.

Reactions to Hughes’s poetry varied. African American presses were the most critical, fearing that he was furthering negative stereotypes. His second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), elicited such painful press captions as “Langston Hughes: The Sewer Dweller” and “the Poet Low-Rate of Harlem.” In 1929, Hughes graduated from the predominantly black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

During these years, Hughes often was at odds with mainstream writers who were credited with shepherding the Harlem Renaissance. W. E. B. Du Bois,Jessie Redmon Fauset, andAlain Locke felt that Hughes needed to present an uplifting portrait of African American life in order to combat the stereotypes that filled earlier literature. Du Bois and Locke accused him of writing about lowbrow subjects; Hughes thought that their assimilationist writing was far more insidious. He wanted to celebrate differences, convey racial pride, and show the beauty in blackness. Locke, a noted intellectual and writer, hoped to educate Hughes about the finer things in life. When he ran into Hughes in Venice, he walked the younger writer around the city, commenting on architecture, pointing out the houses of notables. Hughes was so bored that he left Italy after a week.

Hughes never wavered from what he saw as his mission: portraying black life as it was lived. All writers of this period agreed on the necessity of ridding literature of happy slaves and plantation mammies, but Hughes and his allies Zora Neale Hurston and Gwendolyn Brooks also saw no point in writing sunny tales that showed a race fully in tune with Eurocentric values and culture—with depicting African Americans as no different from whites.

Hughes’s politics drifted to the far left. From about 1932 to 1933, he visited the Soviet Union and wrote radical verse. In 1934, after spending a year in Carmel, California, he published a book of short stories, The Ways of White Folks, in which he was pessimistic about the possibility of easing tensions between the races.

Hughes later became more politically conservative. He drew the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy and was called before the Wisconsin Republican’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to testify about his purported membership in the Communist Party. Hughes denied having ever joined the Party but did concede that some of his more radical poetry had been ill-advised. Conservatives frequently challenged Hughes through the years, but when McCarthy was censured, Hughes was free to detail his Soviet years in his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956).

Hughes’s first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), omitted mention of his leftist leanings, but he attacked racial segregation in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and in Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943). In 1943, he began a weekly column in The Chicago Defender, in which he created a regular character who became immensely popular, Jesse B. Sample (or Simple). Simple carried on a dialogue with another bar patron about racism, race, and issues of the day. The character became the subject of five collections edited by Hughes, ending in 1950 with Simple Speaks His Mind. Hughes died on May 22, 1967, in New York City.

Significance

Langston Hughes was a pioneer of modern black literature. He was one of the first African Americans to be able to earn a living from his writing. He helped young writers gain access to editors of periodicals and at presses. He was a man without guile and appeared to appreciate people as individuals. He wrote over three dozen books: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, children’s stories, histories, opera librettos, and radio and television scripts. He won many major awards for individual works and also was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and two honorary doctoral degrees.

Bibliography

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983. A solid critical biography of Hughes covering his education, politics, involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and his many books and pamphlets. Contains extensive chapter notes.

Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. 1956. Reprint. New York: Hill & Wang, 1995. Hughes’s second autobiography contains his descriptions of his extensive travels and his leftist political involvement.

Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. An overview of Hughes’s life and development as a playwright, poet, and journalist.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981. An excellent detailing of the seeds and germination of the Renaissance. Hughes receives thorough treatment since he was a central figure. This remains the standard work on the period.

Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. An examination of Hughes’s development as a poet. Includes extensive chapter notes and a selected bibliography.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. The definitive biography of Hughes, tracing his life and work from 1902 to 1967. Deals extensively with his personal, political, public, and artistic concerns and accomplishments.

Trotman, C. James, ed. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. A fine collection of essays dealing with such topics as the Harlem Renaissance; the intersections of race, culture, and gender; and Hughes’s continuing influence on poetry, fiction, and drama.