Langston Hughes

Born James Mercer Langston Hughes on 1 February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, he was raised mostly by his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, after his parents separated and his father left for Mexico to escape American racial oppression. His grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, was one of the first Black women to attend Oberlin College; her first husband had died in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Through her stories of resistance and dignity, she shaped his sense of racial responsibility, though he later recalled a childhood marked by loneliness: “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me.” He discovered Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman in high school in Cleveland, and wrote his first jazz poem, “When Sue Wears Red,” before graduating. He studied briefly at Columbia University in 1921 but dropped out, drawn instead to Harlem, which was in the first flush of its Renaissance. Working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., he left three poems beside Vachel Lindsay’s plate; Lindsay read them that night to an audience and declared the discovery of a new poet. The Weary Blues (1926), his first collection, merged the rhythms of blues and jazz with lyric poetry in a way no one had attempted. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” written at seventeen while crossing the Mississippi on a train to visit his father, became one of the most anthologized poems in American literature. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1929, published the novel Not Without Laughter (1930), and over the next four decades produced an enormous body of work , poetry, plays, short stories, essays, children’s books, and the beloved Simple stories, a series of newspaper columns featuring Jesse B. Semple, an Everyman of Black Harlem. He died on 22 May 1967 in New York City, of complications from prostate cancer, at sixty-six.