langston hughes biography in english

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a Black writer whose poems, columns, novels, and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.

Who Was Langston Hughes?

Quick facts, harlem renaissance, poems, books, and other works, accusations of communism, death and legacy.

Poet and writer Langston Hughes became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance after his first poem was published in 1921. His first book of poetry followed five years later, in 1926. One of the first Black Americans to earn a living as a writer, Hughes went on to compose many more works of poetry, prose, and plays that center the 20 th century African American experience and remain influential today. Some of his most famous poems are “Dreams,” “I, Too,” and “Harlem.” Additionally, he wrote a popular column for the Chicago Defender . In May 1967, Hughes died in his mid-60s from prostate cancer.

FULL NAME: James Mercer Langston Hughes BORN: c. February 1, 1901 DIED: May 22, 1967 BIRTHPLACE: Joplin, Missouri ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

James Mercer Langston Hughes, better known as Langston Hughes, was born in Joplin, Missouri. His birth date—likely February 1, 1901—is the subject of some debate. For decades, scholars believed his birthday was February 1, 1902, but archived newspaper evidence found in 2018 suggests Hughes was born one year earlier.

Whatever the year, his parents, James Hughes and Carrie Langston, separated soon after his birth, and his father moved to Mexico.

While Carrie moved around during his youth, Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary, until she died when he was in his early teens. From that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland.

It was during this time that Hughes first began to write poetry, and one of his teachers introduced him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman , both of whom Hughes later cited as primary influences.

Hughes was also a regular contributor to his school’s literary magazine and frequently submitted to other poetry magazines, though they ultimately rejected his work.

Hughes graduated from high school in 1920 and spent the following year in Mexico with his father. In 1921, Hughes had his first poem published; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” appeared in The Crisis magazine and was highly praised.

Also that year, Hughes returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University where he studied briefly. In New York City, he quickly became a part of Harlem’s burgeoning cultural movement, what is commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance .

The young poet dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and worked various odd jobs around New York for the following year, before signing on as a steward on a freighter that took him to Africa and Spain. He left the ship in 1924 and lived for a brief time in Paris, where he continued to develop and publish his poetry.

Hughes was one of the first Black Americans to earn a living as writer. Following his first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in 1921, he wrote hundreds more. His poems appeared in 16 volumes of poetry during his lifetime, starting with The Weary Blues (1926). These poetry books account for roughly half of the more than 35 books Hughes published. He also wrote short story collections, novels, plays, two autobiographies, and even children’s books. His work centers the experiences of everyday African American in the 20 th century.

In 1923, the New York City magazine The World Tomorrow published Hughes’ poem “Dreams.”

“The Weary Blues”

By November 1924, Hughes had returned to the United States and worked various jobs. In 1925, he was working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel restaurant when he met American poet Vachel Lindsay. Hughes showed some of his poems to Lindsay, who was impressed enough to use his connections to promote Hughes’ poetry and ultimately bring it to a wider audience.

That same year, Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize in the Opportunity magazine literary competition, and Hughes also received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in southeast Pennsylvania.

While studying at Lincoln, Hughes’ poetry came to the attention of novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, who used his connections to help get Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , published by Knopf in 1926. The book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his commitment to Black themes and heritage.

One of the poems comprising The Weary Blues was “I, Too,” which examined the relationship of African Americans to the larger culture and society in the early 20 th century. Parts of the poem are now engraved on a wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Hughes was also among the first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban Black people in his work. He published a second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew , in 1927.

Not Without Laughter

After his graduation from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes published his first novel, Not Without Laughter , the next year . The book was commercially successful enough to convince Hughes that he could make a living as a writer.

During the 1930s, Hughes frequently traveled the United States on lecture tours, as well as abroad to the Soviet Union, Japan, and Haiti. He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in 1934, he published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.

“Let America Be America Again”

In July 1936, the writer published one of his most celebrated poems, “Let America Be America Again” in Esquire magazine. The poem examines the unrealized hopes and dreams of the country’s lower class and disadvantaged, expressing a sense of hope that the American Dream will one day arrive.

Hughes later revised and republished “Let America Be America Again” in a small anthology of poems called A New Song .

In 1937, he served as a war correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War .

Simple Character and Stage Work

In 1940, Hughes’ autobiography up to age 28, The Big Sea , was published.

Also around this time, Hughes began contributing a column to the Chicago Defender , for which he created a comic character named Jesse B. Semple, better known as “Simple,” a Black Everyman that Hughes used to further explore urban, working-class Black themes and to address racial issues. The columns were highly successful, and “Simple” was later the focus of several of Hughes’ books and plays.

In the late 1940s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street Scene , which featured music by Kurt Weill. The success of the musical earned Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University) and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months.

Over the next two decades, Hughes continued his prolific output. In 1949, he wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work titled The Poetry of the Negro.

In 1951, Hughes published another acclaimed poem titled “Harlem,” also known as “A Dream Deferred” based on its opening line. According to the Poetry Foundation , Hughes conceived “Harlem” as part of a book-length sequence of poems eventually titled Montage of a Dream Deferred . The collection also featured the poems “Theme for English B” and “Ballad of the Landlord.”

“Harlem” examines how the American Dream can fall short for African Americans. It opens:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry ’s play A Raisin in the Sun , and Martin Luther King Jr. referenced it in a number of his speeches.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Hughes published countless other works, including several books in his “Simple” series, English translations of the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral, another anthology of his own poetry, and the second installment of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander .

Tambourines to Glory

In 1956, Hughes began writing a play called Tambourines to Glory: A Play with Songs . Mixing story and song, Tambourines tells the story of two female street preachers in Harlem whose success allows them to open up a church.

Hughes told The New York Times he tried to sell the play to producers for a couple of years, eventually adapting the story into a novel—his second. It published in 1958 and received acclaim, garnering new interest in a stage production. The play debuted at the Little Theater in November 1963 with cast members including Louis Gossett Jr., Clara Ward, Hilda Simms, and Rosetta LeNoire.

Literary scholars have debated Hughes’ sexuality for years, with many claiming the writer was gay and had included a number of coded references to male lovers in his poems (as did Hughes’ major influence Walt Whitman .

Hughes never married, nor was he romantically linked to any of the women in his life. And several of Hughes’ friends and traveling companions were known or believed to be gay, including Zell Ingram, Gilbert Price, and Ferdinand Smith.

Others have refuted these claims, including Hughes’ primary biographer , who believed him to be likely asexual. But because of Hughes’ secrecy and the era’s homophobia surrounding openly gay men, there is no concrete evidence of Hughes’ sexuality.

According to The New York Times , the House Un-American Activities Committee accused Hughes of being affiliated at one time or another with 91 different communist organizations. In March 1953, the writer was called to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy ’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions about communist influences in his writings.

Although Hughes admitted his works might have been influenced by the ideology, he denied ever being a believer in or member of the communist party and didn’t implicate anyone else in his testimony. “My feeling, sir, is that I have believed in the entire philosophies of the left at one period in my life, including socialism, communism, Trotsky -ism. All -isms have influenced me one way or another, and I can not answer to any specific -ism, because I am not familiar with the details of them and have not read their literature,” Hughes told counsel Roy Cohn , according to transcripts.

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications of prostate cancer at age 66.

A tribute to his poetry, his funeral contained little in the way of spoken eulogy but was filled with jazz and blues music. Hughes’ ashes were interred beneath the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The inscription marking the spot features a line from Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It reads: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Hughes’ Harlem home, on East 127 th Street, received New York City Landmark status in 1981 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Volumes of his work continue to be published and translated throughout the world.

Langston Hughes High School, completed in 2009 and located in Fairburn, Georgia, is named after the poet. The library at Hughes’ alma mater Lincoln University also bears his name.

• An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
• I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
• We Negro writers, just by being Black, have been on the Blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
• Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.
• Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
• The first two or three days, on the way home from school, little white kids, kids my age, 6 and 7 years old, who would throw stones at me. There were other little white kids, 6 and 7 years old, who picked up stones and threw them back at their fellow classmates and defend me and saw that I got home safely. So, I learned very early in life that our race problem is not really of Black against white and white against Black. It’s a problem of people who are not very knowledgeable, or have small minds, or small spirits.
• Negroes—sweet and docile, meek, humble and kind: Beware the day—they change their mind.
• I swear to the Lord, I can’t see why democracy means everybody but me.
• Like welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
• Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of Black blood makes a colored man. One drop you are a Negro!... Black is powerful.
• Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
• Life is a system of half-truths and lies, opportunistic, convenient evasion.
• No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech.
• Jessie Fauset at The Crisis , Charles Johnson at Opportunity , and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called “New Negro Literature” into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born .

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.

Black History

Kamala Harris

Donald Glover

MLK Almost Didn’t Say “I Have a Dream”

Ray Charles

Whoopi Goldberg

Stevie Wonder

Sylvia Rivera

Jesse Owens

Opal Lee: The “Grandmother of Juneteenth”

13 Powerful Marsha P. Johnson Quotes

• Humanities ›
• Literature ›
• Favorite Poems & Poets ›

Biography of Langston Hughes, Poet, Key Figure in Harlem Renaissance

Hughes wrote about the African-American experience

Underwood Archives / Getty Images

• Favorite Poems & Poets
• Poetic Forms
• Best Sellers
• Classic Literature
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• B.A., English, Rutgers University

Langston Hughes was a singular voice in American poetry, writing with vivid imagery and jazz-influenced rhythms about the everyday Black experience in the United States. While best-known for his modern, free-form poetry with superficial simplicity masking deeper symbolism, Hughes worked in fiction, drama, and film as well.

Hughes purposefully mixed his own personal experiences into his work, setting him apart from other major Black poets of the era, and placing him at the forefront of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance . From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, this explosion of poetry and other work by Black Americans profoundly changed the artistic landscape of the country and continues to influence writers to this day.

Fast Facts: Langston Hughes

• Full Name: James Mercer Langston Hughes
• Known For: Poet, novelist, journalist, activist
• Born: February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri
• Parents: James and Caroline Hughes (née Langston)
• Died: May 22, 1967 in New York, New York
• Education: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania
• Selected Works: The Weary Blues, The Ways of White Folks, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Montage of a Dream Deferred
•  Notable Quote: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Early Years

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father divorced his mother shortly thereafter and left them to travel. As a result of the split, he was primarily raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, who had a strong influence on Hughes, educating him in the oral traditions of his people and impressing upon him a sense of pride; she was referred to often in his poems. After Mary Langston died, Hughes moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her new husband. He began writing poetry shortly after enrolling in high school.

Hughes moved to Mexico in 1919 to live with his father for a short time. In 1920, Hughes graduated high school and returned to Mexico. He wished to attend Columbia University in New York and lobbied his father for financial assistance; his father did not think writing was a good career, and offered to pay for college only if Hughes studied engineering. Hughes attended Columbia University in 1921 and did well, but found the racism he encountered there to be corrosive—though the surrounding Harlem neighborhood was inspiring to him. His affection for Harlem remained strong for the rest of his life. He left Columbia after one year, worked a series of odd jobs, and traveled to Africa working as a crewman on a boat, and from there on to Paris. There he became part of the Black expatriate community of artists.

The Crisis to Fine Clothes to the Jew (1921-1930)

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)
• The Weary Blues (1926)
• The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
• Not Without Laughter (1930)

Hughes wrote his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers while still in high school, and published it in The Crisis , the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The poem gained Hughes a great deal of attention; influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, it is a tribute to Black people throughout history in a free verse format:

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.

Hughes began to publish poems on a regular basis, and in 1925 won the Poetry Prize from Opportunity Magazine . Fellow writer Carl Van Vechten, who Hughes had met on his overseas travels, sent Hughes’ work to Alfred A. Knopf, who enthusiastically published Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926.

Around the same time, Hughes took advantage of his job as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel to give several poems to poet Vachel Lindsay, who began to champion Hughes in the mainstream media of the time, claiming to have discovered him. Based on these literary successes, Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and published The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in The Nation . The piece was a manifesto calling for more Black artists to produce Black-centric art without worrying whether white audiences would appreciate it—or approve of it.

In 1927, Hughes published his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. In 1930, Hughes published Not Without Laughter , which is sometimes described as a "prose poem" and sometimes as a novel, signaling his continued evolution and his impending experiments outside of poetry.

By this point, Hughes was firmly established as a leading light in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. The literary movement celebrated Black art and culture as public interest in the subject soared.

Fiction, Film, and Theater Work (1931-1949)

• The Ways of White Folks (1934)
• Mulatto (1935)
• Way Down South (1935)
• The Big Sea (1940)

Hughes traveled through the American South in 1931 and his work became more forcefully political, as he became increasingly aware of the racial injustices of the time. Always sympathetic to communist political theory, seeing it as an alternative to the implicit racism of capitalism, he also traveled extensively through the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

He published his first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks , in 1934. The story cycle is marked by a certain pessimism in regards to race relations; Hughes seems to suggest in these stories that there will never be a time without racism in this country. His play Mulatto , first staged in 1935, deals with many of the same themes as the most famous story in the collection, Cora Unashamed , which tells the story of a Black servant who develops a close emotional bond with the young white daughter of her employers.

Hughes became increasingly interested in the theater, and founded the New York Suitcase Theater with Paul Peters in 1931. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, he also co-founded a theater troupe in Los Angeles while co-writing the screenplay for the film Way Down South . Hughes imagined he would be an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood; his failure to gain much success in the industry was put down to racism. He wrote and published his autobiography The Big Sea in 1940 despite being only 28 years old; the chapter titled Black Renaissance discussed the literary movement in Harlem and inspired the name "Harlem Renaissance."

Continuing his interest in theater, Hughes founded the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941 and began writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender , which he would continue to write for two decades. After World War II and the Civil Rights Movement ’s rise and successes, Hughes found that the younger generation of Black artists, coming into a world where segregation was ending and real progress seemed possible in terms of race relations and the Black experience, saw him as a relic of the past. His style of writing and Black-centric subject matter seemed passé .

Children’s Books and Later Work (1950-1967)

• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
• The First Book of the Negroes (1952)
• I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956)
• The Book of Negro Folklore (1958)

Hughes attempted to interact with the new generation of Black artists by directly addressing them, but rejecting what he saw as their vulgarity and over-intellectual approach. His epic poem "suite," Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) took inspiration from jazz music, collecting a series of related poems sharing the overarching theme of a "dream deferred" into something akin to a film montage—a series of images and short poems following quickly after each other in order to position references and symbolism together. The most famous section from the larger poem is the most direct and powerful statement of the theme, known as Harlem :

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode ?

In 1956, Hughes published his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander . He took a greater interest in documenting the cultural history of Black America, producing A Pictorial History of the Negro in America in 1956, and editing The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958.

Hughes continued to work throughout the 1960s and was considered by many to be the leading writer of Black America at the time, although none of his works after Montage of a Dream Deferred approached the power and clarity of his work during his prime.

Although Hughes had previously published a book for children in 1932 ( Popo and Fifina ), in the 1950s he began publishing books specifically for children regularly, including his First Book series, which was designed to instill a sense of pride in and respect for the cultural achievements of African Americans in its youth. The series included The First Book of the Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1954), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1964).

The tone of these children’s books was perceived as very patriotic as well as focused on the appreciation of Black culture and history. Many people, aware of Hughes’ flirtations with communism and his run-in with Senator McCarthy , suspected he attempted to make his children’s books self-consciously patriotic in order to combat any perception that he might not be a loyal citizen.

Personal Life

While Hughes reportedly had several affairs with women during his life, he never married or had children. Theories concerning his sexual orientation abound; many believe that Hughes, known for strong affections for Black men in his life, seeded clues about his homosexuality throughout his poems (something Walt Whitman, one of his key influences, was known to do in his own work). However, there is no overt evidence to support this, and some argue that Hughes was, if anything, asexual and uninterested in sex.

Despite his early and long-term interest in socialism and his visit to the Soviet Union, Hughes denied being a communist when called to testify by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He then distanced himself from communism and socialism, and was thus estranged from the political left that had often supported him. His work dealt less and less with political considerations after the mid-1950s as a result, and when he compiled the poems for his 1959 collection Selected Poems, he excluded most of his more politically-focused work from his youth.

Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and entered the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on May 22, 1967 to undergo surgery to treat the disease. Complications arose during the procedure, and Hughes passed away at the age of 65. He was cremated, and his ashes interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where the floor bears a design based on his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers , including a line from the poem inscribed on the floor.

Hughes turned his poetry outward at a time in the early 20th century when Black artists were increasingly turning inward, writing for an insular audience. Hughes wrote about Black history and the Black experience, but he wrote for a general audience, seeking to convey his ideas in emotional, easily-understood motifs and phrases that nevertheless had power and subtlety behind them.

Hughes incorporated the rhythms of modern speech in Black neighborhoods and of jazz and blues music, and he included characters of "low" morals in his poems, including alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes, whereas most Black literature sought to disavow such characters because of a fear of proving some of the worst racist assumptions. Hughes felt strongly that showing all aspects of Black culture was part of reflecting life and refused to apologize for what he called the "indelicate" nature of his writing.

• Als, Hilton. “The Elusive Langston Hughes.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner.
• Ward, David C. “Why Langston Hughes Still Reigns as a Poet for the Unchampioned.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 22 May 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-langston-hughes-still-reigns-poet-unchampioned-180963405/.
• Johnson, Marisa, et al. “Women in the Life of Langston Hughes.” US History Scene, http://ushistoryscene.com/article/women-and-hughes/.
• McKinney, Kelsey. “Langston Hughes Wrote a Children's Book in 1955.” Vox, Vox, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/4/2/8335251/langston-hughes-jazz-book.
• Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.
• 14 Classic Poems Everyone Should Know
• Biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, the People’s Poet
• Poems to Read on Thanksgiving Day
• Biography of Gabriela Mistral, Chilean Poet and Nobel Prize Winner
• Carl Sandburg, Poet and Lincoln Biographer
• Biography of Allen Ginsberg, American Poet, Beat Generation Icon
• Gary Snyder, American Poet
• Biography of Emily Dickinson, American Poet
• Biography of Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian Poet
• Octavio Paz, Mexican Poet, Writer, and Nobel Prize Winner
• 10 Classic Poems on Gardens and Gardening
• A Guide to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
• Poems of War and Remembrance
• Biography of Lord Byron, English Poet and Aristocrat
• Presidential Inauguration Poems
• Patriotic Poems for Independence Day

• National Poetry Month
• Materials for Teachers
• Literary Seminars
• American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

• Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Search more than 3,000 biographies of contemporary and classic poets.

Page submenu block

• literary seminars
• materials for teachers
• poetry near you

Langston Hughes

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 shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. 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.

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. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965);  Simple Stakes a Claim  (Rinehart, 1957);  Simple Takes a Wife  (Simon & Schuster, 1953);  Simple Speaks His Mind  (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949  (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps , edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

Related Poets

Steve Dalachinsky

Steve Dalachinsky was born on September 29, 1946.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta on September 10, 1880, and was raised in Rome, Georgia, and Atlanta.

Poet and novelist Al Young was named the Poet Laureate of California in 2005

Anne Spencer

Anne Spencer was born Anne Bethel Scales Bannister on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, to former slaves, Joel Cephus Ba

Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell is the author of several poetry collections, including  A Probable Volume of Dreams  (Atheneum, 1969), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans.

Newsletter Sign Up

• Academy of American Poets Newsletter
• Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
• Teach This Poem