Langston Hughes
African-American poet, playwright, novelist, and journalist. Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was reared in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Mary’s first husband had died at Harpers Ferry fighting under John Brown and her second husband (Hughes’s grandfather) had also been a fierce abolitionist. She helped inspire in Hughes a devotion to the cause of social justice.
A lonely child, Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921, after a failed reunion with his father, he entered Columbia University, but left after an unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe, a busboy, and a dishwasher, his verse appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis (NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League). As a poet, Hughes was a pioneer in the fusion of traditional verse with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
Hughes was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, publishing two verse collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as a novel Not Without Laughter (1930) and an embittered short-story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). Mainly because of the depression and disillusionment with a wealthy patron, Hughes became a socialist in the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he published radical verse and essays in magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year (1932-1933) in the Soviet Union. Several of his plays also appeared in this decade, the most successful, Mulatto, a tragedy about miscegenation, reaching Broadway in 1935.
Around 1939, Hughes moved away from the political Left, as the apolitical tone of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) suggests. During the war he supported the Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a verse collection, Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). He vigorously attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black weekly Chicago Defender, where he created a comic but incisive black urban Everyman, Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple.” Simple’s popularity over 20 years resulted in five published collections.
In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene, Hughes achieved a major critical success. After buying a house in Harlem, he lived there the rest of his life, although, as his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) revealed, he feared for the future of urban blacks. His output became prodigious and included another book of verse, almost a dozen children’s books, several opera libretti, four books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories, another novel, a history of the NAACP and another volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander (1956). He also continued his work in the theater, pioneering in the gospel musical play.
By the time of his death, Hughes was widely recognized as the most representative of African-American writers and perhaps the most original of black poets. What set him apart was the deliberate saturation of his work in the primary expressive forms of black mass culture as well as in the typical life experiences of the mass of African Americans, whom he viewed with near-total love and devotion. Despite his humane interest in other cultures and peoples, he saw blacks as his primary audience. As a result, his vast body of work, uneven in quality as it is, nevertheless rings with almost unrivaled authority and authenticity as an inspired portrait of black American culture and consciousness.