Hughes attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, living on his own in a boarding house. He was an avid reader influenced by The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. He also studied other major writers, both black and white, and began writing dialect poems as well as free verse for publication in the school literary magazine. After a disappointing visit with his father in Mexico in 1920, Hughes wrote what would become his most famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Du Bois published it in Crisis, and the seventeen-year-old Hughes gained notoriety as a poet.

     In the 1920s Hughes devoted most of his time to writing, enrolling in Columbia University but not feeling accepted there, he found more excitement among Harlem’s literary and musical crowd. Jessie Fauset introduced him to W. E. B. Du Bois. He also met Augustus Dill, the homosexual business manager for Crisis, who became an immediate and lasting friend. Hughes worked odd jobs such as busboy, clerk, and flower salesman until he dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and sailed to West Africa and then on to the Netherlands. In 1924 he lived in Paris where he found work as a chausseur at a lesbian-run cabaret called the Cozy Corner and then at a more prominent cabaret, Le Grand Duc where he heard legendary expatriate black jazz musicians perform all night long. In 1925 upon his return to the United States, he met many prominent Harlem literary figures such as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps. It was also in 1925 that his decision to discreetly give three poems to poet Vachel Lindsay catapulted Hughes into national notoriety. He received the Amy Spingam poetry award from the Crisis, and entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he would earn his bachelor’s degree in 1929.

     In 1926 Hughes met Zora Neale Hurston, and they spent the next year touring the South collecting black folklore. The two would later write Mule Bone together, but due to a falling out between Hughes and Hurston, the play was not published or produced until 1991. Hughes met Charlotte Mason in 1927. She was a rich white woman who became Hughes’s patron providing him with regular income while he wrote his first novel, Not without Laughter. This arrangement ended when the two could not agree on Hughes’s subject matter. In the 30s Hughes continued to stand out as the people’s poet, embarking on a reading tour of the South. In 1932 he boarded the Europa as part of a black movie production group headed for the Soviet Union. The socialistic group planned to depict American racial relations in a Soviet film. It was to be called Black and White. The film was never produced for a combination of reasons, and when the group dissolved, Hughes went on to Central Asia and finally to China, Korea, and Japan before returning to the United States in 1933. He lived and wrote in Carmel, California, where his articles sold to publications such as Scribner’s, the New Yorker, and Harper’s. He also completed a book of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.

     By the 1940s Hughes was a leading black poet as well as a leading fiction writer and playwright. During the 40s he wrote his famous "Simple" tales and translated works by Nicolas Guillen and Haitan writer Jacques Romain as well as co-edited the anthology, The Poetry Of the Negro, 1746-1949. Hughes taught as a visiting professor at Atlanta University and was the poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago. In the 1950s Hughes wrote prolifically producing a book-length poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, a second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, and a wide range of plays and fiction, most concerning black history. When the 1960s racial turbulence rocked America, Hughes poetry mirrored it. His last book of poems, The Panther and the Lash, contained protest poems such as "The Blacklash Blues," and poems exploring the independence of African countries, but it was not published until after his death.

     Langston Hughes died May 22, 1967, two weeks after taking himself to a hospital with abdominal pain. A moving funeral celebration climaxed with the recitation of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" as Hughes made his final journey the flames.

Sources used:

"Hughes," Encyclopedia of Literature (1995 ed.), 566.

Mueller, Michael E. "Langston Hughes," Contemporary Black Biography (1993 ed.), IV, 128-133.

Watson, Steve. The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.