Wikipedia: Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902, - May 22, 1967) was an African American poet, novelist, playwright, and newspaper columnist. He was born in Joplin, Missouri. He was raised by his grandmother, and when he was thirteen years old he began to write poetry.

Hughes's grandmother influenced his life and imagination deeply. She took him to Oswatomie where she shared the platform as an honored guest of Teddy Rooosevelt (she was the last surviving widow of the 1859 John Brown raid.

Hughes's early life prepared him well to write about humanity, for as a child and young man he lived in many places and met many different kinds of people. His growing-up years were, altogether, not very happy, but they provided him with experiences that many people never have. It was in Lincoln, Illinois where he stayed with his mother (who had remarried a man name Homer Clark) that he discovered books. Upon his graduation in 1919, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his father. This made him unhappy. Most of the time Langston, depressed, contemplated suicide.

After this, he spent a year attending Columbia University.

Like many creative Americans at the time, such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes spent time in Paris, France. During the height of the great gathering of minds in Montparnasse, for most of 1924, he lived at 15, Rue de Nollet.

In November 1924 he moved to Washington D.C Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926. In 1929 he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. One of his biographers stated that in 1930 his first novel Not Without laughter won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties.

He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in “Montage of a Dream Deferred”.

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?

His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contribution of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Langston Hughes's art reflects this deep understanding of black people. But it also expresses the love for them. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Much of Langston’s poetry tries to capture the rhythms of blues music, the music he believed to be the true expression of the black spirit. His published works through 1965 include nine volumes of poetry, eight of short stories and sketches, two novels, seven children's books, a number of plays, essays, and translations, and a two-volume autobiography. Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in New York City.