Marie Livingston

Mrs. Sherrer

ENG 252

April 28, 2008

 

James Langston Hughes

 

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902 to Carrie Langston Hughes, who was a teacher, and James Nathaniel Hughes, a storekeeper.  Hughes had a hard childhood.  His parents separated, so his mother had to move around looking for work.  This is what brought about him living with his grandmother, Mary Langston in Lawrence, Kansas.  After his grandmother’s passing, Hughes went to live with family friends.  Soon, he went to live with his mother and step-father in Cleveland, Ohio.  During high school in Ohio, Hughes edited the yearbook and wrote for the school newspaper.

For a short period of time, after graduation, Hughes went to live with his father in Mexico.  He knew that his father disagreed with his desire to be a writer, yet he wanted his father to help him pay for college at Columbia University.  Hughes’ father wanted him to be an engineer.  He continued writing poetry, regardless of how his father felt.  Hughes’ first published poem was The Negro Speaks of Rivers which appeared in Crisis Magazine, a NAACP publication.  “After Hughes sent some of his poetry to the Brownies Book and Crisis Magazine and it was accepted, his father was impressed enough to agree to pay for a year at Columbia University” (Kansas Heritage).  After about a year, he left Columbia because of “racial prejudice within the institution” (Wikipedia). 

After dropping out of Columbia University, Hughes went out on a freighter bound for West Africa.  He then traveled to Paris and worked as a doorman and a bouncer of a night club.  Soon after, he returned to the United States.  Hughes still continued writing.  “Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems” (Liukkonen).  His poetry soon earned him a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.  It was there that Hughes received his bachelor’s degree.  “His first book of verse, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926” (Liukkonen). 

Hughes was a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance.  He wrote his first novel, Not Without Laughter, in 1930.  He wrote with financial support from a white woman named Charlotte Mason.  The book made it big and Hughes bought himself a Ford.  Then he decided to go around Southern America touring colleges as a teacher and poet.  “Hughes was one of the first black authors, who could support himself by his writings” (Liukkonen). 

Langston Hughes had many obstacles to overcome in his lifetime.  One being that he was black and another was his being a homosexual during a time that something like this was NOT accepted.  In his short story Blessed Assurance, he speaks of his father’s anger towards him for being gay. 

“In the forty-odd years between Hughes’ first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing” (redhotjazz).  Hughes had a long list of works.  Here are only a few: Not Without Laughter (1930), his autobiographies, his collection of poetry: The Weary Blues (1926), The Negro Mother (1931), The Dream Keeper (1932), and Poems from Black Africa (1963).  “Langston Hughes was, in his later years, deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," a title he encouraged” (Kansas Heritage). 

On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died of prostate cancer at his residence in Harlem, at the age of 65.