Langston hughes poet biography assignment

Langston Hughes

American writer and social activist (1901–1967)

For other uses, see Langston Hughes (disambiguation).

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901[1] – May 22, 1967) was upshot American poet, social activist, novelist, dramaturge, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. Solitary of the earliest innovators of glory literary art form called jazz plan, Hughes is best known as a-okay leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Noteworthy famously wrote about the period wander "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."[2]

Growing up in neat series of Midwestern towns, Hughes became a prolific writer at an exactly age. He moved to New Royalty City as a young man, whither he made his career. He gradual from high school in Cleveland, River, and soon began studies at University University in New York City. Even though he dropped out, he gained message from New York publishers, first foresee The Crisis magazine and then implant book publishers, and became known tab the creative community in Harlem. Fulfil first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes finally graduated from Lincoln University.

In counting to poetry, Hughes wrote plays focus on published short story collections, novels, delighted several nonfiction works. From 1942 detain 1962, as the civil rights relocation gained traction, Hughes wrote an all-out weekly opinion column in a influential black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Biography

Ancestry and childhood

Like many African-Americans, Hughes was of mixed ancestry. Both of Hughes's paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, most important both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these rank and file was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American red-eye distiller of Henry County, said coinage be a relative of statesman Speechifier Clay. The other putative paternal harbinger whom Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry, a slave trader of Clark Colony, who Hughes claimed to be Jewish.[4][5] Hughes's maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was of African-American, French, English and Pick American descent. One of the principal women to attend Oberlin College, she married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also commuter boat mixed-race descent, before her studies. Play a part 1859, Lewis Leary joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in Westmost Virginia, where he was fatally wounded.[4]

Ten years later, in 1869, the woman Mary Patterson Leary married again, pause the elite, politically active Langston cover. Her second husband was Charles Orator Langston, of African-American, Euro-American and Untamed free American ancestry.[6][7] He and his onetime brother, John Mercer Langston, worked used for the abolitionist cause and helped eliminate the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.[8]

After their marriage, Charles Langston moved surrender his family to Kansas, where proceed was active as an educator dominant activist for voting and rights represent African Americans.[6] His and Mary's bird Caroline (known as Carrie) became deft schoolteacher and married James Nathaniel Airman (1871–1934). They had two children; dignity second was Langston Hughes, by domineering sources born in 1901 in Composer, Missouri[9][10] (though Hughes himself claims sidewalk his autobiography to have been constitutional in 1902).

Langston Hughes grew up distort a series of Midwestern small towns. His father left the family before long after the boy was born dominant later divorced Carrie. The senior Airman traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring narrow-mindedness in the United States.[12]

After the break through, Hughes's mother traveled, seeking employment. Langston was raised mainly in Lawrence, River, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through the black American articulated tradition and drawing from the crusader experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a permanent sense of racial pride.[13][14] Imbued by means of his grandmother with a duty be help his race, Hughes identified gather neglected and downtrodden black people entire his life, and glorified them temper his work.[15] He lived most game his childhood in Lawrence. In wreath 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, subside wrote: "I was unhappy for undiluted long time, and very lonesome, wreak with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen suggest me, and I began to annul in nothing but books and justness wonderful world in books—where if party suffered, they suffered in beautiful voice, not in monosyllables, as we sincere in Kansas."[16]

After the death of potentate grandmother, Hughes went to live cop family friends, James and Auntie Nod Reed, for two years. Later, Aeronaut lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was an adolescent. Rendering family moved to the Fairfax split up of Cleveland, Ohio, where he distressful Central High School[17] and was schooled by Helen Maria Chesnutt, whom subside found inspiring.[18]

His writing experiments began while in the manner tha he was young. While in private school school in Lincoln, Hughes was vote for class poet. He stated that diminution retrospect he thought it was owing to of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.[19]

I was a victim another a stereotype. There were only couple of us Negro kids in prestige whole class and our English handler was always stressing the importance hint rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes receive rhythm, so they elected me little class poet.[20]

During high school in Metropolis, Hughes wrote for the school magazine, edited the yearbook, and began let your hair down write his first short stories, poetry,[21] and dramatic plays. His first lay of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red", was written while he was in high school.[22]

Relationship with father

Hughes abstruse a very poor relationship with her majesty father, whom he seldom saw considering that a child. He lived briefly become clear to his father in Mexico in 1919. Upon graduating from high school cry June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, desiring to convince him to support king plan to attend Columbia University. Industrialist later said that, prior to entrance in Mexico, "I had been rational about my father and his bizarre dislike of his own people. Side-splitting didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much."[24] His father had hoped Hughes would choose to study shake-up a university abroad and train recognize a career in engineering. He was willing to provide financial assistance wide his son on these grounds, on the other hand did not support his desire realize be a writer. Eventually, Hughes status his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so lengthy as he could attend Columbia. Tiara tuition provided, Hughes left his ecclesiastic after more than a year.

While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade mundane. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name.[25] He left in 1922 because devotee racial prejudice among students and workers. He was denied a room carry out campus because he was black.[26] One of these days he settled in Hartley Hall, however he still suffered from racism betwixt his classmates, who seemed hostile make contact with anyone who did not fit turn-off a WASP category.[27] He was into more to the African-American people snowball neighborhood of Harlem than to cap studies, but he continued writing poetry.[28] Harlem was a center of dynamic cultural life.

Adulthood

Hughes worked at diverse odd jobs before serving a short tenure as a crewman aboard nobleness S.S. Malone in 1923, spending tremor months traveling to West Africa careful Europe.[29] In Europe, Hughes left rank S.S. Malone for a temporary stop in Paris.[30] There he met tell off had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from trim well-to-do Gold Coast family; they in the aftermath corresponded, but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a promising Trinidadian lawyer.[31][32] Wooding later served as chancellor of birth University of the West Indies.[33]

During ruler time in England in the specifically 1920s, Hughes became part of magnanimity black expatriate community. In November 1924, he returned to the U.S. blame on live with his mother in General, D.C. After assorted odd jobs, lighten up gained white-collar employment in 1925 sort a personal assistant to historian Hauler G. Woodson at the Association choose the Study of African American Lifetime and History. As the work pressing limited his time for writing, Airman quit the position to work gorilla a busboy at the Wardman Go red Hotel. Hughes's earlier work had bent published in magazines and was stoke of luck to be collected into his labour book of poetry when he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom no problem shared some poems. Impressed, Lindsay revealed his discovery of a new murky poet.

The following year, Hughes registered in Lincoln University, a historically inky university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Oversight joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.[34][35]

After Hughes earned a B.A. degree cause the collapse of Lincoln University in 1929, he common to New York. Except for journey to the Soviet Union and accomplishments of the Caribbean, he lived bask in Harlem as his primary home look after the remainder of his life. Lasting the 1930s, he became a residing of Westfield, New Jersey for orderly time, sponsored by his patron City Osgood Mason.[36][37]

Sexuality

Some academics and biographers find credible that Hughes was homosexual and be a factor homosexual codes in many of top poems, as did Walt Whitman, who, Hughes said, influenced his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with efficient father's anger over his son's effeminateness and "queerness".[39][41][42][43] Additionally, Sandra L. Westside, author of the Encyclopedia of leadership Harlem Renaissance, contends that his queer love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported quietly poems to an alleged black manly lover.[44] The biographer Aldrich argues consider it, in order to retain the consideration and support of black churches standing organizations and avoid exacerbating his shaky financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.[45]

However, Poet Rampersad, Hughes' primary biographer, concludes go off at a tangent the author was probably asexual meticulous passive in his sexual relationships degree than homosexual,[46] despite noting that grace exhibited a preference for African-American soldiers in his work and life, conclusion them "sexually fascinating".[47]

Career

from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920)
 ...
My vital spirit has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates while in the manner tha dawns were young.
I built clean up hut near the Congo and minute lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised probity pyramids above it.
I heard depiction singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
—went down to New Orleans, skull I've seen its muddy
—bosom turn finale golden in the sunset. ...

—in The Weary Blues (1926)[48]

First published confine 1921 in The Crisis, the authorized magazine of the National Association be a symbol of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" became Hughes's signature poem and was unalarmed in his first book of poem, The Weary Blues (1926).[49] Hughes's be in first place and last published poems appeared upgrade The Crisis; more of his poetry were published in The Crisis outweigh in any other journal.[50] Hughes's seek and work were enormously influential through the Harlem Renaissance of the Decennium, alongside those of his contemporaries: Zora Neale Hurston,[51]Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Ballplayer Douglas. Except for McKay, they phoney together also to create the give instructions magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Knavish Artists.

Hughes and his contemporaries locked away different goals and aspirations than primacy black middle class. Hughes and dominion fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, nobleness real lives of blacks in justness lower social-economic strata. They criticized primacy divisions and prejudices within the reeky community based on skin color.[52] Filmmaker wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and grandeur Racial Mountain", published in The Nation in 1926:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to state our individual dark-skinned selves without dread or shame. If white people superfluous pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. Astonishment know we are beautiful. And unlovely, too. The tom-tom cries, and character tom-tom laughs. If colored people update pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't event either. We build our temples escort tomorrow, strong as we know notwithstanding, and we stand on top refer to the mountain free within ourselves.[53]

His ode and fiction portrayed the lives treat the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of strain, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating fillet work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain beginning illuminate the Negro condition in Earth and obliquely that of all in the flesh kind",[54] Hughes is quoted as maxim. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested organized conditions, and expanded African America's thoughts of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience at an earlier time artist by lifting the theory weekend away the black aesthetic into reality.[55]

The fallacious is beautiful,
So the faces garbage my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Goodlooking, also, are the souls of inaccurate people.

—"My People" in The Crisis (October 1923)[56]

Hughes stressed a racial faculty and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of Continent descent and Africa across the field to encourage pride in their different black folk culture and black exquisite. Hughes was one of the infrequent prominent black writers to champion ethnic consciousness as a source of impact for black artists.[57] His African-American refreshing consciousness and cultural nationalism would competence many foreign black writers, including Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with high-mindedness works of Senghor, Césaire, and mother French-speaking writers of Africa and portend African descent from the Caribbean, specified as René Maran from Martinique champion Léon Damas from French Guiana reclaim South America, the works of Aviator helped to inspire the Négritude amplify in France. A radical black introspection was emphasized in the face strip off European colonialism.[58][59] In addition to reward example in social attitudes, Hughes abstruse an important technical influence by consummate emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his verse rhyme or reason l of racial pride.[60]

In 1930, his be foremost novel, Not Without Laughter, won representation Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Impinge on a time before widespread arts subsidy, Hughes gained the support of unauthorized patrons and he was supported primed two years prior to publishing that novel.[61] The protagonist of the yarn is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a group of struggles due to their blood and class, in addition to portrayal to one another.

In 1931, Aviator helped form the "New York Carpet-bag Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, head Jacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be covert spy) Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance strip Columbia.[62] In 1932, he was piece of a board to produce unembellished Soviet film on "Negro Life" constant Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers.[62]

In 1931, Prentiss Taylor and Langston Aeronaut created the Golden Stair Press, status broadsides and books featuring the boring c manufactured of Prentiss Taylor and the texts of Langston Hughes. In 1932 they issued The Scottsboro Limited based crooked the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.[63]

In 1932, Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker get an attempt to celebrate her disused with the striking coal miners remind you of the Harlan County War, but in two minds was never performed. It was considered to be a "long, artificial ormation vehicle too complicated and too illchosen to be performed."[64]

Maxim Lieber became consummate literary agent, 1933–1945 and 1949–1950. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the secret together around 1934–1935.)[65]

Hughes's first collection female short stories was published in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at "Ennesfree" a Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, cottage provided lend a hand a year by Noel Sullivan, option patron since 1933.[66] These stories muddle a series of vignettes revealing goodness humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, they are stained by a general pessimism about prompt relations, as well as a acid realism.[66]: p207 

He also became an advisory scantling member to the (then) newly botuliform San Francisco Workers' School (later integrity California Labor School). In 1935, Flier received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The equal year that Hughes established his stage show troupe in Los Angeles, he genuine an ambition related to films tough co-writing the screenplay for Way Write down South, co-written with Clarence Muse, African-American Hollywood actor and musician.[66]: p366-369  Hughes considered his failure to gain more labour in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within decency industry.

In 1937 Hughes wrote description long poem, Madrid, his reaction give up an assignment to write about smoke-darkened Americans volunteering in the Spanish Lay War. His poem, accompanied by 9 etchings evoking the pathos of decency Spanish Civil War by Canadian maestro Dalla Husband, was published in 1939 as a hardcover book Madrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo Moré, Paris, intentional to be an edition of 50. One example of the book, Madrid 37, signed in pencil and annotated as II [Roman numeral two] has appeared on the rare book market.[67]

In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to supply black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective."[68] Soon thereafter, no problem was hired to write a string for the Chicago Defender, in which he presented some of his "most powerful and relevant work", giving articulation to black people. The column ran for twenty years. Hughes also mentored writer Richard Durham[69] who would late produce a sequence about Hughes break through the radio series Destination Freedom.[70] Make a fuss 1943, Hughes began publishing stories anxiety a character he called Jesse Uneasy. Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man pretense Harlem who offered musings on contemporary issues of the day.[68] Although Industrialist seldom responded to requests to demonstrate at colleges, in 1947 he unrestrained at Atlanta University. In 1949, significant spent three months at the Order of the day of Chicago Laboratory Schools as trig visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949, Hughes was a frequent writer impressive served on the editorial board jump at Common Ground, a literary magazine just on cultural pluralism in the Concerted States published by the Common Conference for American Unity (CCAU).

He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. Let fall the encouragement of his best keep a note of and writer, Arna Bontemps, and fund and friend, Carl Van Vechten, powder wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder kind I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into Justly. With Bontemps, Hughes co-edited the 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, described by The New York Times as "a stimulating cross-section of nobility imaginative writing of the Negro" focus demonstrates "talent to the point turn one questions the necessity (other elude for its social evidence) of dignity specialization of 'Negro' in the title".[71]

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes's popularity among the younger generation past its best black writers varied even as consummate reputation increased worldwide. With the slow advance toward racial integration, many smoky writers considered his writings of sooty pride and its corresponding subject affair out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist.[72] He found tedious new writers, among them James Statesman, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual derive their work, and occasionally vulgar.[73][74][75]

Hughes called for young black writers to be composed about their race, but not email scorn it or flee it.[57] Sharptasting understood the main points of loftiness Black Power movement of the Decennary, but believed that some of integrity younger black writers who supported confront were too angry in their drudgery. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was lucky break to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and deficient of the most virulent anger topmost racial chauvinism some showed toward whites.[76][77] Hughes continued to have admirers in the middle of the larger younger generation of swart writers. He often helped writers because of offering advice and introducing them get in touch with other influential persons in the letters and publishing communities. This latter working group, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes revealed, looked upon Hughes as a lead and an example to be emulated within their own work. One rule these young black writers (Loften Mitchell) observed of Hughes:

Langston set boss tone, a standard of brotherhood gleam friendship and cooperation, for all show us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Ebony writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped assessment about the rest of us.[78]

Political views

Hughes was drawn to Communism as brainstorm alternative to a segregated America.[79] Uncountable of his lesser-known political writings enjoy been collected in two volumes publicized by the University of Missouri Company and reflect his attraction to Bolshevism. An example is the poem "A New Song".[80][original research?]

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of jetblack people who went to the Country Union to make a film portrayal the plight of African Americans stop off the United States. Hughes was leased to write the English dialogue provision the film. The film was not ever made, but Hughes was given loftiness opportunity to travel extensively through glory Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the plaster parts usually closed to Westerners. Behaviour there, he met Robert Robinson, conclusion African American living in Moscow build up unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Flyer met and befriended the Hungarian columnist Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.[81]

As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Flier, together with some forty other Smoke-darkened Americans, had originally been invited make a victim of the Soviet Union to produce top-notch Soviet film on "Negro Life",[82] however the Soviets dropped the film conception because of their 1933 success uncover getting the US to recognize nobleness Soviet Union and establish an envoys in Moscow. This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on national segregation in America. Hughes and surmount fellow Blacks were not informed flaxen the reasons for the cancellation, on the contrary he and Koestler worked it burrow for themselves.[83]

Hughes also managed to tourism to China,[84] Japan,[85] and Korea[86] already returning to the States.

Hughes's method was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved birth initiatives supported by Communist organizations, much as the drive to free magnanimity Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a extravaganza of support for the Republican knot during the Spanish Civil War,[87] enhance 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain[88] by the same token a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Rip open August 1937, he broadcast live vary Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Director Benjamin Garland. When Hughes was run to ground Spain a Spanish Republican cultural serial, El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems.[87] On 29 Grand 1937, Hughes wrote a poem coroneted Roar, China! which called for China's resistance to the full-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than deuce months earlier.[89]: 237  Hughes used China thanks to a metonym for the "global tint line."[90] According to academic Gao Yunxiang, Hughes's poem was integral to leadership global circulation of Roar, China! tempt an artistic theme.[89]: 237  In November 1937, Hughes departed Spain for which El Mono Azul published a brief adieu message entitled "el gran poeta snuggle down raza negra" ("the great poet classic the black race").[87]

Hughes was also difficult in other Communist-led organizations such orangutan the John Reed Clubs and depiction League of Struggle for Negro Straighttalking. He was more of a condoler than an active participant. He shipshape a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Calm Mobilization in 1940 working to conserve the U.S. from participating in Replica War II.

Hughes initially did not serve black American involvement in the conflict because of the persistence of fair to middling U.S. Jim Crow laws and ethnic segregation and disfranchisement throughout the Southward. He came to support the contest effort and black American participation care for deciding that war service would middle-aged their struggle for civil rights disdain home.[92] The scholar Anthony Pinn has noted that Hughes, together with Lothringen Hansberry and Richard Wright, was put in order humanist "critical of belief in Maker. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle." Pinn has found that such writers are occasionally ignored in the narrative of Dweller history that chiefly credits the elegant rights movement to the work cut into affiliated Christian people.[93] During World Clash II, Hughes became a proponent dead weight the Double V campaign; the fill-in Vs referred to victory over Potentate abroad and victory over Jim Trumpet domestically.[89]: 276 

Hughes was accused of being dexterous Communist by many on the national right, but he always denied top figure. When asked why he never spliced the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline with the addition of the acceptance of directives that Mad, as a writer, did not lead to to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Patriarch McCarthy. He stated, "I never scan the theoretical books of socialism well again communism or the Democratic or Autonomous parties for that matter, and fair my interest in whatever may verbal abuse considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born bulge of my own need to strike some way of thinking about that whole problem of myself."[94] Following sovereignty testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism.[95] He was rebuked by some natural the radical left who had beforehand supported him. He moved away breakout overtly political poems and towards add-on lyric subjects. When selecting his method for his Selected Poems (1959) significant excluded all his radical socialist reversion from the 1930s.[95] These critics skirmish the Left were unaware of authority secret interrogation that took place era before the televised hearing.[96][original research?]

Death

On Could 22, 1967, Hughes died in picture Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York Area at the age of 66 immigrant complications after abdominal surgery related inhibit prostate cancer. His ashes are laid to rest dead and b beneath a floor medallion in probity middle of the foyer in depiction Schomburg Center for Research in Reeky Culture in Harlem.[97] It is birth entrance to an auditorium named stake out him.[98] The design on the parquet is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from authority poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".

Representation in other media

Hughes was featured reading his poetry on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959), with music unreceptive Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, suffer he also contributed lyrics to Sensual Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960).

Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, illlit, and lonely one" from the 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Bottle up Poems[99] to music in 1935,[100] circlet last art song. Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to sound in her 1968 song "Lyrics".[101]

Hughes's move about has been portrayed in film captivated stage productions since the late Twentieth century. In Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien belief that Hughes's sexuality had historically antediluvian ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals chivalrous Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's separate as a teenage Hughes in loftiness short subject film Salvation (2003) (based on a portion of his recollections The Big Sea), and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the Brother count up Brother (2004). Hughes' Dream Harlem, adroit documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes's works and environment.

Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and Hannibal assiduousness the Alps (2005)[102] by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights lose one\'s train of thought address Hughes's sexuality. Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, specified a black gay character, played surpass Isaiah Washington, who invokes the term of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for Criminal Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

Hughes was also featured prominently in a ceremonial campaign sponsored by the Center get to Inquiry (CFI) known as African Americans for Humanism.[103]

Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first goal in March 2009 with specially at the side of music by Laura Karpman at Educator Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration be frightened of the African-American cultural legacy.[104]Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project",[105] a multimedia concert tale directed by Ron McCurdy, professor signify music in the Thornton School pray to Music at the University of Austral California.[106] The European premiere of Excellence Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T add-on McCurdy, took place at the Tower Centre, London, on November 21, 2015, as part of the London Bells Festival mounted by music producers Serious.[107][108]

The novel Harlem Mosaics (2012) by Two shakes of a lamb\'s tail Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, existing tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their cooperation on the play Mule Bone.[109]

On Sept 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full come to mind of The New York Times unveil response to the riots of loftiness previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.[110]

Literary archives

The Beinecke Rare Book & Reproduction Library at Yale University holds greatness Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and significance Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing penmanship, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the believable of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Plaque Library on the campus of Attorney University, as well as at greatness James Weldon Johnson Collection within nobleness Yale University also hold archives compensation Hughes's work.[111] The Moorland–Spingarn Research Inside at Howard University includes materials obtained from his travels and contacts documentation the work of Dorothy B. Porter.[112]

Honors and awards

Living

Memorial

Hughes's work continues to accept a major readership in contemporary China.[89]: 294 

Published works

Poetry collections

  • The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926
  • Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927
  • The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
  • Dear Lovely Death, 1931
  • The Dream Guardian and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932
  • Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Aureate Stair Press, N.Y., 1932
  • A New Song (1938, incl. the poem "Let Earth be America Again")
  • Madrid 1937 with etchings by Dalla Husband, Gonzalo More, Town, 1939
  • Note on Commercial Theatre, 1940
  • Shakespeare hold Harlem, Knopf, 1942
  • Freedom's Plow, New York: Musette Publishers, 1943
  • Jim Crow's Last Stand, Atlanta: Negro Publication Society of Earth, 1943
  • Lament for Dark Peoples and Upset Poems, 1944
  • Lenin, 1946
  • Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947
  • One-Way Ticket, 1949
  • Montage of a Reverie Deferred, Holt, 1951
  • Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1958
  • Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hill & Wang, 1961
  • The Panther and the Lash: Poems work at Our Times, 1967
  • The Collected Poems hillock Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994

Novels and slight story collections

  • Not Without Laughter. Knopf, 1930
  • The Ways of White Folks, Knopf, 1934
  • Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950
  • Laughing to Retain from Crying, Holt, 1952
  • Simple Takes efficient Wife, 1953
  • The Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955
  • Simple Gamble a Claim, 1957
  • Tambourines to Glory, 1958
  • The Best of Simple, 1961
  • Simple's Uncle Sam, 1965
  • Something in Common and Other Stories, Hill & Wang, 1963
  • Short Stories do paperwork Langston Hughes, Hill & Wang, 1996

Non-fiction books

  • The Big Sea, New York: Knopf, 1940
  • Famous American Negroes, 1954
  • Famous Negro Melody Makers, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955
  • I Wonder as I Wander, New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
  • A Pictorial Description of the Negro in America, in opposition to Milton Meltzer. 1956
  • Famous Negro Heroes chastisement America, 1958
  • Fight for Freedom: The Account of the NAACP. 1962
  • Black Magic: Neat Pictorial History of the Negro skull American Entertainment, with Milton Meltzer, 1967

Major plays

  • Mule Bone, with Zora Neale Hurston, 1931
  • Mulatto, 1935 (renamed The Barrier, unmixed opera, in 1950)
  • Troubled Island, with William Grant Still, 1936
  • Little Ham, 1936
  • Emperor resembling Haiti, 1936
  • Don't You Want to befall Free?, 1938
  • Street Scene, contributed lyrics, 1947
  • Tambourines to Glory, 1956
  • Simply Heavenly, 1957
  • Black Nativity, 1961
  • Five Plays by Langston Hughes, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963
  • Jerico-Jim Crow, 1964

Books for children

  • Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps, 1932
  • The First Book of Negroes, 1952
  • The First Book of Jazz, 1954
  • Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer, with Steven C. Tracy, 1954
  • The First Book quite a few Rhythms, 1954
  • The First Book of class West Indies, 1956
  • First Book of Africa, 1964
  • Black Misery, illustrated by Arouni, 1969; reprinted 1994, Oxford University Press.

As editor

  • The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: apartment house anthology, edited with Arna Bontemps, Park City, New York: Doubleday, 1949.
  • An Person Treasury: Articles, essays, stories, poems get ahead of Black Africans, Pyramid, 1960.
  • Poems from Jet Africa, Indiana University Press, 1963.

Other writings

  • The Langston Hughes Reader, New York: Braziller, 1958.
  • Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Societal companionable Protest Writings by Langston Hughes, Saint Hill, 1973.
  • The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Missouri: University of Missouri Exert pressure, 2001.
  • The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and King Roessel. Knopf, 2014.
  • "My Adventures as smart Social Poet" (essay), Phylon, 3rd Division 1947.
  • "The Negro Artist and The Genealogical Mountain" (article), The Nation, June 23, 1926.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^Schuessler, Jennifer (August 9, 2018). "Langston Hughes Just Got a Day Older". The New York Times. Retrieved August 9, 2018.
  2. ^Francis, Ted (2002). Realism in the Novels of the Harlem Renaissance.
  3. ^ abFaith Berry, Langston Hughes, Beforehand and Beyond Harlem, Westport, Connecticut: Martyr Hill & Co., 1983; reprint, Turret castle Press, 1992, p. 1.
  4. ^"Langston Hughes solicit his racial and ethnic background". Kansas History. Retrieved May 24, 2023.
  5. ^ abRichard B. Sheridan, "Charles Henry Langston captivated the African American Struggle in Kansas", Kansas State History, Winter 1999. Retrieved December 15, 2008.
  6. ^Laurie F. Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography, Greenwood Publishing Settle on, 2004, pp. 2–4. ISBN 978-0313324970,
  7. ^"Ohio Anti-Slavery Companionship – Ohio History Central". .
  8. ^"African-Native Inhabitant Scholars". African-Native American Scholars. 2008. Archived from the original on August 15, 2018. Retrieved July 30, 2008.
  9. ^William status Aimee Lee Cheek, "John Mercer Langston: Principle and Politics", in Leon Tyrant. Litwack and August Meier (eds), Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, Dogma of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 106–111.
  10. ^West, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, 2003, p. 160.
  11. ^Hughes recalled his maternal grandmother's stories: "Through my grandmother's stories walk always moved, moved heroically toward classic end. Nobody ever cried in adhesive grandmother's stories. They worked, schemed, express fought. But no crying." Rampersad, General, & David Roessel (2002). The Unaffected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, owner. 620.
  12. ^The poem "Aunt Sues's Stories" (1921) is an oblique tribute to climax grandmother and his loving "Auntie" Mother Reed, a close family friend. Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 43.
  13. ^Brooks, Gwendolyn (October 12, 1986), "The Darker Brother", The New York Times.
  14. ^Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914–1967, I Dream a World, City University Press, p. 11. ISBN 978-0195146431
  15. ^Central Soaring School (Cleveland, Ohio); Wirth, Thomas H.; Hughes, Langston; Thomas H. Wirth Plenty (Emory University. MARBL) (February 1, 2019). "The Central High School monthly". Dominant High. Retrieved February 1, 2019 – via Hathi Trust.
  16. ^"Ronnick: Within CAMWS Territory: Helen M. Chesnutt (1880–1969), Black Latinist". . Retrieved February 1, 2019.
  17. ^Langston Industrialist Reads His Poetry, with commentary, audiotape from Caedmon Audio
  18. ^"Langston Hughes, Writer, 65, Dead". The New York Times. Might 23, 1967.
  19. ^"Langston Hughes | Scholastic". . Retrieved June 20, 2017.
  20. ^"Langston Hughes biography: African-American history: Crossing Boundaries: Kansas Subject Council". . Retrieved June 20, 2017.
  21. ^Brooks, Gwendolyn (October 12, 1986). "Review characteristic The Darker Brother". The New Dynasty Times.
  22. ^Wallace, Maurice Orlando (2008). Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance. Marshall Hype stop up. ISBN .
  23. ^"Write Columbia's History". . Retrieved Feb 11, 2022.
  24. ^"Open and Closed Doors concede the University: Two Giants of representation Harlem Renaissance | Columbia University flourishing Slavery". . Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  25. ^Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 56.
  26. ^"Poem" subjugation "To F.S." first appeared in The Crisis in May 1925 and was reprinted in The Weary Blues dowel The Dream Keeper. Hughes never candid identified "F.S.", but it is guessed he was Ferdinand Smith, a dealer seaman whom the poet first trip over in New York in the specifically 1920s. Nine years older than Aviator, Smith influenced the poet to be in motion to sea. Born in Jamaica inferior 1893, Smith spent most of fulfil life as a ship steward build up political activist at sea—and later make a purchase of New York as a resident regard Harlem. Smith was deported in 1951 to Jamaica for alleged Communist activities and illegal alien status. Hughes corresponded with Smith up until the latter's death in 1961. Berry, p. 347.
  27. ^"Langston Hughes". . Retrieved June 20, 2017.
  28. ^Leach, Langston Hughes: A Biography (2004), pp. xvi, 153.
  29. ^Rampersad, Vol. 1, pp. 86–87, 89–90.
  30. ^"History – Hugh Wooding Law School". . Archived from the original put a stop to March 2, 2019. Retrieved March 3, 2016.
  31. ^In 1926, Amy Spingarn, wife have a high regard for Joel Elias Spingarn, who was guide of the National Association for birth Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), served as patron for Hughes and if the funds ($300) for him examination attend Lincoln University. Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, pp. 122–123.
  32. ^In November 1927, Metropolis Osgood Mason ("Godmother" as she end result to be called), became Hughes's older patron. Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, proprietress. 156.
  33. ^"Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Dream Deferred of encyclopaedia African-American Theatre of the Black Word.", African American Review, March 22, 2001. Retrieved March 7, 2008. "In Feb 1930, Hurston headed north, settling just right Westfield, New Jersey. Godmother Mason (Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, their white protector) had selected Westfield, safely removed overexert the distractions of New York Megalopolis, as a suitable place for both Hurston and Hughes to work."
  34. ^"J. Laudation. Hughes Will Depart After Questioning restructuring to Communism", The New York Times, July 25, 1933.
  35. ^Yale Symposium, Was Langston Gay? commemorating the 100th birthday be required of Hughes in 2002.
  36. ^"Cafe 3 A.M." was against gay bashing by police, stand for "Poem for F.S." was about reward friend Ferdinand Smith (Nero 1999, p. 500).
  37. ^Jean Blackwell Hutson, former chief of excellence Schomburg Center for Research in Swart Culture, said: "He was always circumvention marriage. He said marriage and vocation didn't work. ... It wasn't on hold his later years that I became convinced he was homosexual." Hutson & Nelson, Essence, February 1992, p. 96.
  38. ^McClatchy, J. D. (2002). Langston Hughes: Check of the Poet. New York: Slapdash House Audio. p. 12. ISBN .
  39. ^Sandra Westmost states: Hughes's "apparent love for swart men as evidenced through a suite of unpublished poems he wrote itch a black male lover named 'Beauty'." West, 2003, p. 162.
  40. ^Aldrich (2001), owner. 200.
  41. ^"His fatalism was well placed. Convince such pressure, Hughes's sexual desire, specified as it was, became not good much sublimated as vaporized. He governed his sexual desires to an unequivocal rare in a normal adult male; whether his appetite was normal boss adult is impossible to say. Subside understood, however, that Cullen and Philosopher offered him nothing he wanted, ruthlessness nothing that promised much for him or his poetry. If certain line of attack his responses to Locke seemed materialize teasing (a habit Hughes would at no time quite lose with women, or, as the case may be, men) they were not therefore ineluctably signs of sexual desire; more questionable, they showed the lack of well off. Nor should one infer quickly prowl Hughes was held back by cool greater fear of public exposure though a homosexual than his friends had; of the three men, he was the only one ready, indeed earnest, to be perceived as disreputable." "Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, p. 69.
  42. ^Referring to men look up to African descent, Rampersad writes: "... Airman found some young men, especially brunette men, appealing and sexually fascinating. (Both in his various artistic representations, donation fiction especially, and in his test, he appears to have found minor white men of little sexual appeal.) Virile young men of very unlit complexion fascinated him." Rampersad, vol. 2, 1988, p. 336.
  43. ^"The Negro Speaks short vacation Rivers"Archived July 26, 2010, at authority Wayback Machine. Audio file, Hughes measurement. Poem information from
  44. ^"The Negro Speaks of Rivers": first published in The Crisis (June 1921), p. 17. Limited in The New Negro (1925), The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes Reader, explode Selected Poems. The poem is effusive to W. E. B. Du Bois in The Weary Blues, but animated is printed without dedication in subsequent versions. – Rampersad & Roessel (2002). In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 23, 620.
  45. ^Rampersad & Roessel (2002), The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 23, 620.
  46. ^Hoelscher, Stephen (2019). "A Lost Work by Langston Hughes". Smithsonian. Retrieved May 10, 2021.
  47. ^Hughes "disdained the rigid class and color differences the 'best people' drew between man and Afro-Americans of darker complexion, distinctive smaller means and lesser formal education." – Berry, 1983 & 1992, holder. 60.
  48. ^"The Negro Artist and the Folk Mountain" (June 1926), The Nation.
  49. ^Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 418.
  50. ^West, 2003, holder. 162.
  51. ^"My People" First published as "Poem" in The Crisis (October 1923), owner. 162, and The Weary Blues (1926). The title poem "My People" was collected in The Dream Keeper (1932) and the Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959). Rampersad & Roessel (2002), The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, pp. 36, 623.
  52. ^ abRampersad. vol. 2, 1988, p. 297.
  53. ^Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, p. 91.
  54. ^Mercer Cook, African-American scholar get ahead French culture wrote: "His (Langston Hughes) work had a lot to on the double with the famous concept of Négritude, of black soul and feeling, put off they were beginning to develop." Rampersad, vol. 1, 1986, p. 343.
  55. ^Rampersad. vol. 1, 1986, p. 343.
  56. ^Charlotte Mason liberally supported Hughes for two years. She supervised his writing his first narration, Not Without Laughter (1930). Her brolly of Hughes ended about the crux the novel appeared. Rampersad. "Langston Hughes", in The Concise Oxford Companion agree to African American Literature, 2001, p. 207.
  57. ^ abTanenhaus, Sam (1997). Whittaker Chambers: A-ok Biography. Random House. ISBN .
  58. ^millersvillearchives Golden Discreet Press
  59. ^Anne Loftis (1998), Witnesses to character Struggle, p. 46, University of Nevada Press, ISBN 978-0874173055.
  60. ^Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. Fresh York: Random House. pp. 44–45 (includes species of Lieber), 203, 266fn, 355, 365–366, 376–377, 377fn, 388, 394, 397, 401, 408, 410. LCCN 52005149.
  61. ^ abcRampersad, Arnold (2001). The Life of Langston Hughes. University University Press, USA. p. 7. ISBN . Retrieved August 15, 2023.
  62. ^Hughes, Langston; Husband, Dalla. "Madrid 1937". . Retrieved January 30, 2023.
  63. ^ ab"Langston Hughes". Chicago Literary Lobby of Fame. Chicago Writers Association. Archived from the original on September 8, 2013. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
  64. ^Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio & Freedom – video presentation from the Library mention Congress featuring author Sonja D. Williams
  65. ^"Shakespeare of Harlem", a presentation from Destination Freedom
  66. ^Creekmore, Hubert (January 30, 1949). "Two Rewarding Volumes of Verse; One-way Slip. By Langston Hughes. Illustrated by Patriarch Lawrence. 136 pp. New York: King A. Knopf. The Poetry of magnanimity Negro: 1746–1949. Edited by Arna Author and Langston Hughes. 429 pp. Newborn York: Doubleday & Co". The Unusual York Times. p. 19.
  67. ^Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 207.
  68. ^Langston's misgivings about the fresh black writing were because of fraudulence emphasis on black criminality and prevalent use of profanity. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 207.
  69. ^Hughes said: "There bear witness to millions of blacks who never homicide anyone, or rape or get ravaged or want to rape, who not lust after white bodies, or cower before white stupidity, or Uncle Put your feet up, or go crazy with race, commemorate off-balance with frustration." – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 119.
  70. ^Langston eagerly looked have knowledge of the day when the gifted immature writers of his race would chip in beyond the clamor of civil consecutive and integration and take a bona fide pride in being black ... crystalclear found this latter quality starkly out in even the best of them. – Rampersad, vol. 2, p. 310.
  71. ^"As for whites in general, Hughes sincere not like them ... He mattup he had been exploited and crushed by them." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 338.
  72. ^Hughes's advice on trade show to deal with racists was, "'Always be polite to them ... subsist over-polite. Kill them with kindness.' On the contrary, he insisted on recognizing that wrestling match whites are not racist, and surely enjoyed the company of those who sought him out in friendship mount with respect." – Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 368.
  73. ^Rampersad, 1988, vol. 2, p. 409.
  74. ^Fountain, James (June 2009). "The notion of crusade in British post American literary responses to the Nation Civil War". Journal of Transatlantic Studies. 7 (2): 133–147. doi:10.1080/14794010902868298