Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and newspaper columnist. He is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Contents

1 Life
2 Career
3 Political views
4 Bibliography
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links

Life

Langston Hughes as a baby in 1902, photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Langston Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, the son of Carrie Langston Hughes, a teacher, and her husband, James Nathaniel Hughes. After abandoning his family and the resulting legal dissolution of the marriage later, James Hughes left for Cuba first, then Mexico due to enduring racism in the United States. After the separation of his parents, young Langston was left to be raised mainly by his grandmother, Mary Langston, as his mother sought employment. Through the black American oral tradition of storytelling, she would instill in the young Langston Hughes a sense of indelible racial pride. He spent most of childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother, he went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. His childhood was not an entirely happy one due to an unstable early life, but it was one that heavily influenced the poet he would become. Later, he lived again with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois who had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually in Cleveland, Ohio where he attended high school.

Langston Hughes in Cleveland,Ohio high school circa 1919-1920, photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

While in grammar school in Lincoln, Illinois, he was designated class poet because of, Hughes said later as an adult, his race, African Americans then being stereotyped as having rhythm. Langston Hughes Reads his poetry with commentary,audiotape from Caedmon Audio During high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote for the school paper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, When Sue Wears Red, was written while he was still in high school. It was during this time that he discovered his love of books. From this early period in his life, Hughes would cite as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg. Hughes spent a brief period of time with his father in Mexico in 1919. The relationship between him and his father was troubled, causing Hughes a degree of dissatisfaction that led him to contemplate suicide at least once. Upon graduating from high school in June of 1920, Hughes returned to live with his father hoping to convince him to provide money to attend Columbia University. Hughes later said that prior to arriving in Mexico again, "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much." Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940), pp.54-56 Initially, his father hoped for Langston to attend a university anywhere but in the United States and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son. James Hughes did not support his son's desire to be a writer. Eventually, Langston and his father came to a compromise. Langston would study engineering so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided, Hughes left his father after more than a year of living with him. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice within the institution and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.

Langston Hughes, photographed by Nickolas Muray, 1923

Hughes worked various odd jobs before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923,spending 6 months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris. Unlike specific writers of the post-WWI era who became identified as the Lost Generation, writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hughes instead spent time in Paris during the early 1920s becoming part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924 Hughes returned to the states to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. Hughes again found work doing various odd jobs before gaining white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the scholar Carter G. Woodson within the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Not satisfied with the demands of the work and time constraints this position with Carter placed on the hours he spent writing, Hughes quit this job for one as a busboy in a hotel. It was while working as a busboy that Hughes would encounter the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet though by this time Hughes' earlier work had already been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.

Langston Hughes, Lincoln University, photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The following year, Hughes enrolled in and, in 1929, graduated from Lincoln University, PA, a HBCU. Hughes received a B.A. degree from this same institution and years later was awarded a Lit.D. in 1943 from it. A second honorary doctorate would be awarded to him in 1963 by Howard University, another HBCU. Barring numerous travels that also included parts of the Caribbean and West Indies, Harlem was Hughes’s primary home for the remainder of his life.

In New York City on May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer at the age of 65. The ashes of Langston Hughes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer leading to the auditorium named for him within the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Whitaker, Charles.Ebony magazine In Langston Hughes:100th birthday celebration of the poet of black America. April 2002. Many of Langston Hughes' personal papers reside in the Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

On the issue of the sexual orientation of Hughes, academics and biographers generally agree that Hughes was gay and included gay codes into many of his poems similar in manner to Walt Whitman, whose work Hughes would cite as another influence on his poetry, and most patently in the short story Blessed Assurance. Yale Symposium, Was Langston Gay? commemorating the 100th birthday of Hughes in 2002 Schwarz,pp.68-88 Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African American men in his work and life. "Referring to men of African descent, Rampersad writes "...Hughes found some young men, especially dark-skinned men, appealing and sexully facinating. (Both in his various artistic representations, in fiction especially, and in his life, he appears to have found young white men of little sexual appeal.) Virile young men of very dark complexion facinated him. Rampersad, 1988. p336 This love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to a black male lover. Sandra West explicitly states Hughes' "apparent love for black men as evidenced through a series of unpublished poems he wrote to a black male lover named 'Beauty'." West,2003. p.162

Career

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues, Cover design by Miguel Covarrubias, 1926

First debuting in The Crisis in 1921, the prose that would become the signature poem of Hughes appeared in his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, published in 1926, The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

:I've known rivers:

:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

:flow of human blood in human veins.

:My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

:I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

:I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

:I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

:I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

:went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

:bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

:I've known rivers:

:Ancient, dusky rivers.

:::::::My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas who collectively would create the short lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Hughes and his comptemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class and the three considered the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B. Dubois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain Locke, who they accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture for social equality. Of primary conflict were the depictions of the "low-life," that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for himself and his comtemporaries published in The Nation in 1926, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:

:The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express

:our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.

:If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,

:it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.

:The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people

:are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure

:doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,

:strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain

:free within ourselves.

His poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,"Rampersad,1988, pg. 418 Hughes is quoted as saying. Moreover, Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism absent of self-hate that united people of African descent and Africa across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many black writers such as Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire.

Langston Hughes, photographed by Gordon Parks, 1943, Library of Congress

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy whose family must deal with a variety of struggles imposed upon them due to their race and class in society in addition to relating to one another. Hughes first collection of short stories came in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. These stories provided a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. In 1938, Hughes would establish the Harlem Suitcase Theater followed by the New Negro Theater in 1939 in Los Angeles, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941. The same year Hughes established his threatre troupe in Los Angeles, his ambition to write for the movies materialized when he co-wrote the screenplay for Way Down South. Further hopes by Hughes to write for the lucrative movie trade were thwarted because of racial discrimination within the industry. Through the black publication Chicago Defender, Hughes in 1943 gave creative birth to Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled Simple, the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. He was offered to teach at a number of colleges, but seldom did. In 1947, Hughes taught a semester at the predominantly black Atlanta University. Hughes, in 1949, spent three months at the integrated Laboratory School of the University of Chicago as a "Visiting Lecturer on Poetry." He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, works for children, and, with the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English. Much of his writing was inspired by the rhythms and language of the black church, and, the blues and jazz of that era, the music he believed to be the true expression of the black spirit; an example is "Harlem" (sometimes called "Dream Deferred") from Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), from which a line was taken for the title of the play Raisin in the Sun.

During the mid 1950s and 1960s, Hughes popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist.Rampersad, 1988,p.207 He in turn found a number of writers like James Baldwin lacking in this same pride, over intellectualizing in their work, and occasionally vulgar. Though he was able to understand the main points of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, he believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes' posthumously published Panther and the Lash in 1967 was intended to show solidarity and understanding with these writers but with more skill and absent of the most virile anger and terse racial chauvinism some showed toward whites."As for whites in general, Hughes did not like them...He felt he had been exploited and humiliated by them." Rampersad, 1988,p.338Hughes' advice on how to deal with racists was "'Always be polite to them...be over-polite. Kill them with kindness.' But, he insisted on recognizing that all whites are not racist, and definitely enjoyed the company of those who sought him out in friendship and with respect." Rampersad, 1988,p.368 Hughes still continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers who he often helped by offering advice to and introducing to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, who happened to include Alice Walker who Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated in degrees and tones within their own work. One of these young black writers observed of Hughes, "Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us."Rampersad,1988, pg. 409

Political views

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of disparate blacks who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of most blacks living in the United States at the time. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. Hughes would also manage to travel to China and Japan before returning home to the States.

Hughes' poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys and support of the Spanish Republic. Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, even though he was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in WWII. Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the irony of U.S. Jim Crow laws existing at the same time a war was being fought against Fascism and the Axis Powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after coming to understand that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously supported him on the Radical Left. Over time, Hughes would distance himself from his most radical poems. In 1959 came the publication of his Selected Poems. Absent from this group of poems was his most controversial work.

Langston Hughes

Life

Career

Political views

Bibliography

Notes

References

External links