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Langston Hughes (1903-1967)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=84

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Langston Hughes including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/hughes.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Langston Hughes.

BIOGRAPHY

A Midwesterner by birth, Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas with some time spent as well in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico. Hughes received some of his impetus to write about the specific experience of African Americans, in part, from his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston—whose husband had been killed with John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Even before attending Columbia University, Hughes had published in Crisis magazine what would become a signature poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." After a year at Columbia, Hughes left in 1922 to work and to travel to such destinations as West Coast of Africa and Paris. Returning to the United States in 1924, he received notoriety as the most talented and original poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book The Weary Blues (1926) boldly celebrated the everyday lives of ordinary black folk in a vernacular poetics influenced by such American forerunners as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg but also based in the kind of blues lyricism, black sermon, other expressive forms rooted in African American culture that he espoused in an important manifesto published in the Nation magazine: "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926). The following year Hughes published his second volume Fine Clothes to the Jew and as a student at Lincoln University received financial support from Mrs. Charlotte Mason, Hughes's patron in the arts during the next two years. Owing to irreconcilable differences in politics, taste, and personality, Hughes reached a parting of the ways with Mason when his first novel Not Without Laughter was published in 1930.

Like many other writers during the Depression, Hughes became a committed political activist on the Left and was involved in the worldwide struggle for social justice. During the early thirties Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union and in addition to publishing radical left poetry, he authored a volume of short stories The Ways of White Folks (1934) and the Broadway play Mulatto (1935) followed other dramatic productions. By 1937, Hughes had left the country again, this time to lend his support to the Internationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, where he wrote his moving war poem "Madrid." Returning once more to America, Hughes published an original collection of radical verse entitled A New Song the following year. During World War II, Hughes continued to inveigh against racism, publishing the first volume of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) and verse collections such as Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943). It was at this time that Hughes reached a wide popular audience in his weekly column for the Chicago Defender that over the next twenty years would follow the wickedly ironic insights of Hughes's comic persona Jesse B. Simple. Following the war, Hughes continued to publish such volumes of verse as Fields of Wonder (1947), One-Way Ticket (1949), and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). By 1953, however, his earlier politics made him a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee hearings during the Red Scare. After McCarthy's own loss of public credibility, Hughes went on to narrate his time in the Soviet Union in the second volume of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956).

A series of successful musical collaborations during the 1950s brought Hughes a measure of prosperity in his late career. His reputation in the Pan-Africanist community culminated in his celebration at the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Hughes's final volume of verse The Panther and the Lash (1967) recounted the racial struggles of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and was posthumously published the year he died in 1967.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes, Before and Beyond Harlem. (1983). Secaucus, N.J. : Carol Pub. Group, 1992.

Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. (1986). New York: Thunder's Mountain Press, 1991.

McKissack, Pat and Fredrick McKissack. Langston Hughes: Great American Poet. Hillside, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1992.

Mikolyzk, Thomas A. Langston Hughes: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Ostrom, Hans A. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Trotman, C. James. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes: American Poet. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER