Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes: 1902-1967

• “With his rich poetic voice, nurturing generosity, warm humor, and abiding love of black people, Langston Hughes was one of the dominant voices in American literature of the twentieth century and the single most influential black poet” (Nichols 2007).
• Born in Joplin, Missouri, but reared chiefly by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas after his parents divorced
• Began creative writing as a boy
• Goes to Columbia University for a year, but drops out because he is disillusioned with formal education; instead he becomes a merchant sailor and joins the crew of the S.S. Malone, which sails for Africa and stops at thirty ports
• Lives in Paris, Venice, and Genoa before he heads to New York
• Becomes an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance
• Other important figures include Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston
• Harlem is home to important theaters and the jazz movement
• 1921: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is published in Crisis (and dedicated to W.E.B. Du Bois)
• 1925: The Weary Blues
• In the 1940s and 50s, he found himself drawn to the Communist Party
• 1953: called to testify before the Senate and Joseph McCarthy
• Labeled a security risk by the FBI until 1959, which meant he couldn’t leave the country as he wouldn’t be able to re-enter
• Tries to rehabilitate his image after this by writing patriotic poetry
• Hughes said he wrote to “explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America”
• Also said, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame”
• A friend said of Hughes: “No one enjoyed being a Negro as much as Langston Hughes” (qtd. in Nichols 2007)
• Wrote in many genres: poetry, fiction, drama, essay, history
• 1930: Not Without Laughter (a coming-of-age novel)
• “Like Whitman, Hughes enhances our love for humanity, our vision of a just society with a spiritual transcendentalism and ever-widening horizons of joy and hope” (Nichols 2007)
• Hughes wanted to “capture the dominant oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form” (Baym 2225)
• Questions that he struggles with:
•  Can a single man speak for an entire race without homogenizing it or essentializing it?
• How should a black writer approach a mostly-white audience?
• Should he emphasize differences or similarities?
• Found some answers in the freedom that comes with Modernism—its forms, its urban settings, etc.

Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Editor. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Nichols, Charles H. “Langston Hughes.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Concise Edition. Ed Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 2006-2007.