Langston Hughes: Education and Influences on a Literary Voice
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 - May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He is known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Early Life and Education
Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. Hughes spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with shorter periods in other Midwestern cities. He was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.
His grandmother provided Hughes with stories and books which opened the world of literature to the young Hughes. Books became a place where he could find refuge in his childhood. After his grandmother’s death, he returned to his mother in Lincoln, Illinois and eventually graduated high school from Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio where he was awarded class poet and editor of the yearbook.
After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman.
Encouraged by his father to pursue a practical education, Hughes began attending Columbia University in New York City in 1921 to study at the school of mines, engineering, and chemistry. He was one of the first Black students to live in the university’s dormitory, although some accounts say that he was denied a room there and instead stayed at a local YMCA. During this time Hughes explored Harlem, forming a permanent attachment to what he called the “great dark city.” He worked at the university’s newspaper, contributing poems under the pen name Lang-Hu. His time at Columbia was for the most part unhappy, however, and he dropped out after a year.
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Literary Beginnings and the Harlem Renaissance
His poetry was first published in the NAACP magazine The Crisis during this time, which gave him some national attention. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926. Back in New York City from seafaring, he met in 1924 the writers Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten, with whom he would have lifelong influential friendships. Hughes won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize in 1925. That same year Van Vechten introduced Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who accepted the collection that Knopf would publish as The Weary Blues in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later.
Hughes claimed that the people he met in his everyday life were the influences of his work, but blues and jazz were the rhythm of his work. His engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951).
In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation: “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.
Hughes's life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries: Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine Fire!! Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.
Literary Style and Themes
Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets… in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people.
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Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, including Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and other French-speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean, such as René Maran from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the Négritude movement in France.
“My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,” Hughes is quoted as saying.
Major Works and Achievements
In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Foundation’s gold medal for literature. In 1940 Hughes published The Big Sea, his autobiography up to age 28. A second volume, I Wonder As I Wander, was published in 1956.
Hughes documented African American literature and culture in works such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Bontemps). He continued to write numerous works for the stage, including the lyrics for Street Scene, an opera with music by Kurt Weill that premiered in 1947. Black Nativity (1961; film 2013) is a gospel play that uses Hughes’s poetry, along with gospel standards and scriptural passages, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus. It was an international success, and performances of the work-often diverging substantially from the original-became a Christmas tradition in many Black churches and cultural centers. Among his other writings, Hughes translated the poetry of Spanish writer Federico García Lorca and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. He was also widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who appeared in Hughes’s columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, appeared in 1994. Some of his political exchanges were collected as Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (2016).
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Later Life and Legacy
Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City.
Lauded as the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” in the 1920s, Langston Hughes was one of the first African American artists to earn a living solely as a writer.
His legacy lives on at KU“Hughes’ legacy lives in numerous ways at KU, but the most obvious example is with the Langston Hughes Center,” Alexander said. As part of the Department African and African-American Studies, the Langston Hughes Center (LHC) serves as an academic research and educational center that builds upon the legacy and insight of Langston Hughes. It coordinates and develops teaching, research and outreach activities in African-American Studies, and the study of race and culture in American society at KU and throughout the Midwest. Since the LHC’s revival in 2008 it has held four major symposiums and sponsored nearly 80 academic talks and programs. KU has also sponsored the Langston Hughes Visiting Professorship since 1977. This program attracts prominent ethnic minority scholars to the campus in a broad range of disciplines. The Langston Hughes Professor teaches two courses a semester and delivers a campus-wide symposium.
Sexuality
Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as did Walt Whitman, who Hughes said influenced his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness". Additionally, Sandra L. West, author of the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, contends that his homosexual love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover. The biographer Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and to avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted. Hughes's poem 'Café: 3 AM' is a criticism of anti-queer sentiment, which can be interpreted either as a reflection of personal experience or allyship with queer communities. Hughes is sometimes viewed as a queer figure; however, his queerness has not been confirmed and is a subject of ongoing debate.
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