Langston hughes online biography timeline

American writer and social activist (1901–1967)

For other uses, see Langston Hughes (disambiguation).

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Growing up in the Midwest, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He studied at Columbia University in New York City. Although he dropped out, he gained notice from New York publishers, first in The Crisis magazine and then from book publishers, and became known in the creative community in Harlem. His first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes eventually graduated from Lincoln University.

In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays and published short story collections, novels, and several nonfiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement gained traction, Hughes wrote an in-depth weekly opinion column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Ancestry and childhood

Like many African-Americans, Hughes was of mixed ancestry. Both of Hughes's paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller of Henry County, said to be a relative of statesman Henry Clay. The other putative paternal ancestor whom Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry, a slave trader of Clark County, who Hughes claimed to be Jewish. Hughes's maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, she married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixe

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised 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.

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. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes’s debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

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. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for 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). His life and work were enormously important in sh

1902 Born in Joplin, Missouri. His parents separate soon after his birth, his father eventually settling in Mexico.

1921 Enrolls at Columbia University with his father’s unwilling support. While at Columbia, Hughes is immersed in the culture of Harlem, meeting W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and other Black cultural leaders. He publishes poetry, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

1922 Withdraws from Columbia and works on trading ships, traveling to Europe and the west coast of Africa.

1926 Publishes The Weary Blues to positive reviews. Enrolls in Lincoln University and publishes “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

1931 After traveling through Cuba and Haiti, publishes essays and poems criticizing capitalism, marking a major ideological turn to the left. Publishes The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, which includes “The Black Clown.”

1932 Travels through the Soviet Union, China, and Japan, and publishes several revolutionary poems including “Goodbye Christ.”

1934 Living in California, publishes short story collection The Ways of White Folks to critical praise.

1935 Hughes’ play Mulatto opens on Broadway. The producer, Martin Jones, is hostile to Hughes’ feelings that the staging is sensationalized.

1937 Travels to Europe to cover the Spanish-American War for the Baltimore Afro-American and other Black newspapers. Meets many writers including W. H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, Federico García Lorca, and Ernest Hemingway.

1938 Returns to the U.S. and founds the Harlem Suitcase Theater.

1939 Writes the script for the motion picture Way Down South. To his dismay, progressive critics accuse him of selling out to Hollywood.

1940 Publishes his autobiography The Big Sea. Is picketed in Los Angeles by members of an evangelical group criticized in “Goodbye Christ.” Alarmed, Hughes publicly repudiates the poem as an aberration of his youth and then is attac

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City. He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operat