James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, to a family of mixed Black and white ancestry, including both former enslaved people and slaveholders. His parents divorced when he was an infant. Hughes lived with various family members in multiple cities across the Midwest, most formatively in Lawrence, Kansas with his maternal grandmother, who helped to develop his sense of pride in his race. He went to high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote for the school newspaper and began writing plays, short stories, and poetry. He attended Columbia University but dropped out due to its racist culture, later earning a B.A. from Lincoln University.
Hughes worked and traveled widely over the next few years, spending time in England, France, and West Africa, while seeing his writing published in major Harlem Renaissance magazines like The Crisis. His poetry debut, the seminal work The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Over his prolific career, Hughes became one of the most prominent figures of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, along with Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, collaborator Zora Neale Hurston, and others. In contrast with many contemporaries, who focused on the stories of upper-class, intellectual Black society, Hughes was influential in writing work that celebrated the rich, varied experiences of working-class Black Americans. His work directly confronted racism and fought to make a competing self-conception of Blackness accessible to everyday people of color.
Most famous for his poetry, Hughes also wrote plays, novels, short stories, non-fiction, and children’s books, as well as an autobiography. From 1942 to 1962, he penned an opinion column in the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender, examining the rising tide of the civil rights movement. He influenced writers overseas such as Aimé Césaire and Nicolás Guillén, and his work was one of the inspirations for the Négritude movement. He also collaborated on many projects to amplify Black writing and art, including the little magazine Fire!!, the anthology The Poetry of the Negro, and theater troupes in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
Hughes died in 1967, leaving a legacy of trailblazing writing and dedicated activism for the Black literary and theatrical communities.
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More Langston Hughes
Audio: Listen to Hughes read his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Text: Read more poetry by Hughes
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Photo by Carl Van Vechten.