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Biography (1902-1967)
Even as a child, Langston Hughes was wrapped in an important African American legacy. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, who was the widow of Lewis Sheridan Leary, one of the band of men who participated in John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Hughes’s works include volumes of poetry, novels, short stories, essays, plays, opera librettors, histories, documentaries, autobiogrpahies, biographies, anthologies, children’s books, and translations, as well as radio and televeision scripts. This impressive body of work makes him an important literary artist and a leading African American voice of the twentieth century. Throughout his long career as a professional writer, Hughes remained true to the African American heritage he celebrated in his writings, which were frankly "racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know." His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, could not accommodate the racial prejudice and economic frustration that were the result of James’s black and white racial ancestry. James abandoned his wife, Carrie Langston Hughes, only one year after their son was born in Joplin, Missouri, and went to find work in Mexico, where he hoped the color of his skin would be less of an issue than in the United States. During the periods when Hughes’s mother shuttled from city to city in the Midwest looking for work, she sent her son to live with his grandmother. Hughes’s spotty relationship with his father— a connection he developed in his late teens and maintained only sporadically thereafter— consisted mostly of arguments about his becoming a writer rather than an engineer and businessman as his father wished. Hughes’s father could not appreciate or even tolerate his son’s ambition to write about the black experience, and Hughes (whose given name was also James but who refused to be identified by it) could not abide his father’s contempt for blacks. Though Hughes had been abandoned by his father, he nevertheless felt an early and deep connection to his ancestors. First and foremost, Hughes considered himself a poet. His poetry echoes the voices of ordinary African Americans and the rhythms of their music. The blues can be heard moving through Hughes’s poetry as well as in the works of many of his contemporaries associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American artists, writers, painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians who were active in New York City’s Harlem of the 1920s. Hughes’s introduction to the "laughter and pain, hunger and heartache" of blues music began the year he spent at Columbia University. He dropped out after only two semesters because he preferred the nightlife and culture of Harlem to academic life. He reveled in the jazz music of Harlem and discovered in its open forms and improvisations an energy and freedom that significantly influenced the style of his poetry. Hughes’s life, like the jazz music that influenced his work, was characterized by improvisation and openness. After leaving Columbia, he worked a series of odd jobs and then traveled as a merchant seaman to Africa and Europe from 1923 to 1924. After his return to the United States in 1925 he published poems in two black magazines, The Crisis and Opportunity, and met the critic Carl Van Vechten, who sent his poems to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. He also worked as a busboy in a Washington, D.C. hotel, where he met the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was instrumental in advancing Hughes’s reputation as a poet. In 1926 Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and enrolled in Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, his education funded by a generous patron. His second volume of verse, Fine Clothes to the Jew, appeared in 1927, and by the time he graduated from Lincoln in 1929 he was on a book tour of the South giving poetry readings. Hughes wrote more prose than poetry during the 1930s, publishing his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), and a collection of stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). During this decade Hughes’s travels took him to all points of the compass— Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Mexico, France, and Spain— but his general intellectual movement was decidedly toward the left. He was watched closely by the FBI and the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives because of his alleged communist activities in the 1930s. Hughes denied that he was ever a member of the Communist Party, but he and others, including Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson, were characterized as "dupes and fellow travelers" by Life Magazine in 1949. He was subpoenaed to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee on subversive activities in 1953 and listed by the FBI as a security risk until 1959. His anger and indignation over these attacks from the right can be seen in his poem "Un-American Investigators" published posthumously in The Panther and the Lash (1967). In 1942 Hughes described his new collection of poems, Shakespeare in Harlem, as "light verse, Afro-American in the blues mood…to read aloud, crooned, shouted, recited, and sung. Some with gestures, some not— as you like." Soon after this collection appeared, the character of Jesse B. Simple emerged from Hughes emerged from Hughes’s 1943 newspaper column for the Chicago Defender. Hughes developed this popular urban African American character in five humorous books published over a fifteen-year period: Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), and Simple’s Uncle Sam (1965). Despite the tremendous amount that Hughes published, including two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), he remains somewhat elusive. He never married or had friends who can lay claim to truly knowing him beyond what he wanted them to know (even though there are several biographies). And yet Hughes is well known— not for his personal life but for his treatment of the possibilities of African American experiences and identities. Like Walt Whitman, one of his favorite writers, Hughes created a persona that spoke for more than himself. Hughes’s poetry reveals his hearty appetite for all humanity, his insistence on justice for all, and his faith in the transcendent possibilities of joy and hope that make room for everyone at America’s table.
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