Langston Hughes - Biography

(1902 - 1967)

Like Whitman, one of his heroes, James Mercer Langston Hughes, born in Missouri in 1902, called a number of places home during his childhood. Unlike his great predecessor, however, he did not have the benefit of a stable family life to provide a sense of emotional security.

The boy’s stagestruck mother was frequently absent, and his ill-tempered father (whom he hated), a man with undisguised disdain for most other blacks, moved to Mexico to escape American oppression. It was left to the boy’s poor but self-reliant grandmother to raise him, and thus he spent many of his formative years in Lawrence, Kansas. After her death, he lived with his mother in several cities before they settled in Cleveland. "My theory is," he later wrote, "children should be born without parents—if born they must be."

It is nowhere carved in stone that an unhappy childhood is a requisite for artistic development, but his own early misfortunes clearly had some advantages for young Langston: he not only developed a rich fantasy life as an alternative to a lonely reality (his color kept him out of the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and movie theaters) but discovered the solace and redeeming power of books.

His guiding star

From an early age he read deeply — Whitman, Longfellow, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg (his "guiding star"), and also W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk) and, especially, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote in black dialect. By the time the intellectually gifted young man had reached his late teens he had already begun to publish the poems that would make him "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race" (a title he may have given himself). Arnold Rampersad, his biographer, tells us that it was not until years later that "the blues" orchestrated his private melancholy and gave it form, but the poet was clearly on his way. 		 
   

traveler

After a year at Columbia University, where he was the only black student living on campus, he held a series of odd jobs and then traveled in Africa, France, and Italy. While his ship was steaming out of New York bound for Africa, the twenty-two-year-old poet suddenly threw overboard the books he had packed, thus symbolically unburdening himself of his past. He saved only his copy of Leaves of Grass: "I had no intention of throwing that one away."

The Weary Blues

Returning to the States, he worked in a restaurant, and one day put three of his poems beside Vache1 Lindsay’s plate. The famous poet announced at a public reading that he had discovered a busboy poet, and newspapers covered the story. Partly as a result, Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (one of his classmates was Thurgood Marshall), and during his years there he published The Weary Blues, the first of his more than forty books. This volume was followed a year later by Fine Clothes to the Jew, which scandalized some black reviewers, who feared that its focus on the bleaker aspects of life, coupled with the use of dialect, would play into the hands of a hostile white world.

In basing his poetry on the blues, the young writer wanted to create works of art that all his people would understand; as Rampersad says, he "fashioned an aesthetic of simplicity born out of the speech, music, and actual social conditions of his people." Hughes is, along with Williams and Frost, among the more accessible of modern American poets; in their work, clarity results not from intellectual poverty but from judicious artistic choices. These poets reinforce Randall Jarrell’s assertion that those who have inherited the custom of not reading poetry justify it by referring to the obscurity of the poems they have never read.

In addition to his numerous books of verse, Hughes composed a novel, short stories, essays, film scripts, plays, opera librettos, and an autobiography. The exuberant play Mule Bone, which he wrote with Zora Neale Hurston, was finally produced by New York City’s Lincoln Center in 1991. He also edited anthologies of black poetry and folklore. No matter what the genre, his subject was nearly always the same: the experience of being black in the United States. In recognition of his impressive body of work he was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 1936 and also received a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a prestigious honor society of leading artists that later elected him to its membership.

Radical in his younger years ("Put one more ‘S’ in the USA / and make it Soviet"), he traveled widely in Russia, Japan, and Haiti, and covered the Spanish Civil War in 1937 as a newspaper correspondent.

As he grew older his views became increasingly non-controversial. A central figure in the period of intense productivity of African American art during the twenties and thirties known as the Harlem Renaissance, he had a powerful impact on many young black poets, who followed his lead in drawing on the tradition of the blues.

He died at sixty-five in New York, having left instructions for his mourners to dress in red, "Cause there ain’t no sense / In my being dead." At his memorial service a pianist played Duke Ellington’s "Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me," one of the poet’s favorite songs. Twenty-four years later, in I991, his ashes were interred beneath the floor of an auditorium named in his honor at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in his beloved Harlem, the "great dark city." 		 



top