About Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was born in the city of Joplin, Missouri, USA. After his father left Hughes was brought up by his grandmother while his mother travelled to find work. When his grandmother died, he lived with family friends and then with his mother who had remarried. At high school Hughes wrote poetry, short stories, plays and newspaper articles. A year in Mexico with his father was followed by an unsatisfying year on an engineering course at Columbia University in New York. Hughes left, took various jobs and then joined the crew of a ship and spent six months travelling to Europe and West Africa. He continued to write on his return to the US and had his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, published in 1926.

Hughes published in many different genres, for adults and children, for the next forty years. He represented the lives of African-American people in poems of music, joy, sadness and struggle, influenced by poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Walt Whitman but also by jazz music. He was an early innovator of ‘jazz poetry’ which draws on the rhythms and improvisation of jazz, and a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a vibrant literary and artistic movement that developed from the black New York neighbourhood. Hughes wrote regularly for Crisis magazine, an influential journal of “civil rights, history, politics and culture”, and became an important political voice through a weekly column in a leading black newspaper The Chicago Defender. He died in New York in 1967.