langston hughes biography
...ed African American churches on Seventh Street and enjoyed the spirituals. He liked the blues and spirituals so much that he integrated them into his poetry. Hughes frequented other locations in the city too. On Saturday nights, he stopped by author Georgia Johnson’s home at 1461 S Street to discuss literature, eat cake and drink wine. Hughes also observed Jewish merchants on upper Seventh Street selling numerous goods. (Hughes, Langston) (Walker, Alice) Following a bad cold that cost him his laundry job, Hughes landed a better one as Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s assistant. At 1539 Ninth Street NW, Woodson edited the Journal of Negro History, not far from the Twelfth Street YMCA where Hughes once stayed. At a salary of fifty-five dollars per week, Hughes’ tasks included cleaning the office and reading proofs. Reading proofs turned out to be much harder than he imagined. It irritated his eyes horribly and this forced Hughes to quit. Within weeks, Hughes began work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. (Emanuel, James) (Walker, Alice) Working at the Hotel, located at 2660 Woodley Road NW, resulted in a stroke of good luck for Hughes, who was in desperate need of money. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, a famous white poet, stayed there. Due to the city’s segregation policy, Hughes could not attend the poet’s reading in the auditorium. Using ingenuity, Hughes hatched a plan. After writing out three of his poems, “Jazzonia”, “Negro Dancers”, and “The Weary Blues”, on a piece of paper, he placed them beside Lindsay’s dinner plate one evening. As he picked up trays of dishes, Hughes saw Lindsay reading them. The next day, in local newspapers, Lindsay informed the world of his discovering a “Negro busboy poet.” (Hughes, Langston) Greater things were destined to come Hughes’ way. He grew to dislike Washington D.C. because of what he often saw as the “rigid class and color lines within the race against Negroes who worked with their hands, or who were dark in complexion and had no college degrees.” (Fitzpatrick, Sandra) (Hughes, Langston) Hughes returned to Mexico to visit with his father, in order to try to convince him that he should pay for his son’s college education at Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia, Hughes planned to get a college education but also begin his career as a writer. On his way to Mexico on the train, while thinking about his past and his future, Hughes wrote the famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. After arriving in Mexico, the tension between Hughes and his father was very evident. Hughes wanted to be a writer; his father wanted him to be an engineer. After Hughes sent some of his poetry to the Brownies Book and Crisis magazines and it was accepted, his father was impressed enough to agree to pay for a year at Columbia University. (Emanuel, James) (Hughes, Langston) Hughes entered Columbia University in the fall of 1921, a little more than a year after he had graduated from Central High School. He only stayed in the university for a year. After he attended Columbia, Hughes discovered Harlem. Hughes often expressed the spirit of the age in his literary works. Hughes began regularly publishing his work in The Crisis and Opportunity magazines. He got to know other writers of the time such as Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson and Claude McCay. When his poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize in the 1925 Opportunity Magazine poetry contest, Hughes’ literary career was launched. His first volume of poetry, also titled The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. (“Harlem”) (Walker, Alice) In New York City, Hughes also fell in love for the first time with a woman named Mary. She was a daughter of a wealthy black man in Manhattan. Langston wanted to marry her after a year long courtship. He went to her father to ask for her hand in marriage. The father rejected Langston’s proposal and he moved Mary to London. Langston was heartbroken and soon questioned his own sexuality. Langston would claim to be homosexual in his later years. (Walker, Alice) Langston Hughes returned to school in 1926, this time to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He was supported by a patron of the arts, a wealthy white woman in her seventies named Charlotte Osgood Mason. Mason directed Hughes’ literary career, convincing him to write the novel Not Without Laughter. The two had a dispute in 1930 and the relationship came to an end. At this point in Hughes’ life he turned to the political “left” and began to develop his interest in a form of government called socialism. He published poetry in New Masses, a journal associated with the Communist Party and in 1932 sailed to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with a group of young African Americans, like himself. Later in the 1930s, Hughes’ primary writing was theatrics. His drama about the miscegenational southern states, Mulatto, became the longest running Broadway play written by an African American. (Walker, Alice) In 1942, Hughes began writing a column for the African American newspaper, The Chicago Defender. In 1943 he introduced the character of Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, to his readers. This fictional ‘Average Joe’ humorously allowed Hughes to discuss very serious racial issues. The Simple columns were also popular and they ran for twenty years. (Hughes, Langston) Money was a nagging concern for Hughes throughout his life. While he managed to support himself as a writer, no small task, he was never financially secure. In 1947, however, through his work writing the lyrics for the Broadway musical Street Scene, Hughes was finally able to earn enough money to purchase a house in Harlem, which had been his dream. He continued to write: Montage of a Dream Deferred, one of his best known volumes of poetry, was published in 1951; and from that time until his death sixteen years later he wrote more than twenty additional works. (“Harlem”) (Walker, Alice) On May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes died after having had abdominal surgery in order to remove cancer that had been plaguing him. His funeral, like his poetry, was all blues and jazz. Famous jazz pianist Randy Weston was called and asked to play for Hughes’ funeral. Very little was said by way of eulogy, but the jazz and the blues were prominent and the final tribute to this writer so influenced by African American musical forms was fitting. (Emanuel, James) (Walker, Alice) Hughes writings through out his entire career focused on the lives of ordinary black people and their battle to overcome social injustice. From his short stories, to his autobiography, the theme of equality is prevalent and apart of his signature style. Some consider Langston Hughes a “hot, sexy black dude who was good with words” (London, Brian) and some consider him “a classic literature figure; a poet with realist views on the barriers of race” (Côté, Joseph). Most critics though, consider him a voice for the black community. (Côté, Joseph) (London, Brian) The “revolutionary African American poet” (Seaman, Donna) has been known for his unique approach to talk about the things, at the time, no one wanted to talk about or hear. “Always a man of his times, Hughes wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness and love. Many of his poems are portraits of people whose lives are impacted by racism and sexual conflicts” (Seaman, Donna). Using rhythm, rhymes and humor, Hughes tackled these controversial subjects that effected many people. (Seaman, Donna) Hughes mainly wrote about the lives of ordinary black people in his poetry. “Hughes always stayed true to his muse, chronicling the black American experience and contrasting the beauty of the soul with the loathsomeness of circumstance” (Seaman, Donna). His works became popular because of his voice for the black community, but also he was the subject of negative criticism from the whites. Hughes tended to write like black people talk, and some considered that a sign of ignorance. “He was castigated for being trite and simplistic” (Seaman, Donna). In many of Langston Hughes’ poems, he uses the slang commonly used by blacks in that time period. “Hughes sought to represent African American Speech with dignity and verve for, in the hands of many white American writers, black dialect was used to perpetuate stereotypes of black ignorance” (Construction: ‘Mother to Son’ by Langston Hughes). Not only did this style of writing make Hughes more renown,...