Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was the central poet of the Harlem Renaissance and the writer who brought blues and jazz rhythm into American verse. Born in Joplin, Missouri in 1901, he was largely raised by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas after his parents separated; his father emigrated to Mexico, disgusted with American racism, and the two were permanently estranged. He wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers at eighteen on a train crossing the Mississippi to visit his father, and it was published in The Crisis in 1921. He spent a year at Columbia, left because of the racial climate, worked as a mess boy on ships to West Africa and Europe, and washed dishes in a Paris nightclub. He was working as a busboy in a Washington hotel in 1925 when he left poems beside the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsay, who publicised them. His first collection, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926, and his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain that year became the movement's manifesto: he attacked the pressure on black writers to present respectable subjects for white approval, insisting on writing about ordinary working people in their own idiom. Older black critics accused him of showing the race badly, particularly over Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927. He kept to it, and in 1943 created Jesse B. Semple, a Harlem everyman whose newspaper columns ran for over twenty years. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932 and wrote radical verse in the 1930s, which brought him before Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee in 1953. Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951 asks what happens to a dream deferred. He died in 1967.

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