Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was an American poet best known for “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a short free-verse poem he wrote at 19 and published in The Crisis in June 1921. Over the next four decades, he became the best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote novels, plays, song lyrics, two memoirs, and a long-running newspaper column, along with lines Americans still quote: “I, too, sing America” and “What happens to a dream deferred?”

Our view is that Hughes’s real achievement was to make the everyday speech and music of Black America count as poetry. Where other Harlem Renaissance poets proved they could master the sonnet, he trusted the blues stanza, the street-corner joke, and the newspaper column, and reached more readers than any of them. His plainness was a choice, not a limitation, and it is why his poems are still read aloud in classrooms a century later.

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Why He Matters · Timeline · Life and Career · Poetry and Style · Famous Poems and Books · Legacy · FAQ
Related Poets

Why Langston Hughes Matters

Before Hughes, Black American poets faced an awkward choice between the dialect verse of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s era, which white readers often treated as comedy, and formal English verse that hid where the poet came from. Hughes found a third way. He wrote in the voices people actually used in Harlem kitchens, Chicago bars, and Southern churches, and he built poems on the three-line blues stanza and the rhythms of jazz, showing that Black vernacular culture was a source of art, not something to rise above.

He also changed what a poet’s career could look like. Hughes wrote for magazines, newspapers, the stage, and children, toured the South reading to Black audiences in churches and schools, and answered letters from young writers for decades. Poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to the writers of the Black Arts Movement learned from him, and the questions he asked in “I, Too” and “Harlem,” about who belongs in America and what happens to postponed hopes, still frame how the country talks about race.

Langston Hughes Timeline

These are the key dates in Hughes’s life and career.

1901

James Mercer Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1.

1916

He enters Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, where he writes for the school newspaper and edits the yearbook.

1920

On a train to visit his father in Mexico, he writes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

1921

The poem appears in The Crisis in June, and he enrolls at Columbia University in the fall.

1922

He leaves Columbia after a year and settles into Harlem life.

1923

He sails to West Africa as a crewman on the SS Malone.

1924

After months in Paris, he is stranded in Genoa, Italy, where he writes “I, Too.”

1925

“The Weary Blues” wins first prize in Opportunity magazine’s contest, and in December Vachel Lindsay reads his poems at the Wardman Park Hotel.

1926

Knopf publishes The Weary Blues, and The Nation prints his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

1927

Fine Clothes to the Jew appears, and he tours the South with Zora Neale Hurston.

1929

He graduates from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

1930

His first novel, Not Without Laughter, is published and wins the Harmon Gold Medal.

1932

He travels to the Soviet Union for a film project that collapses and stays more than a year.

1934

He publishes the short story collection The Ways of White Folks.

1935

His play Mulatto opens on Broadway on October 24, and he wins a Guggenheim Fellowship.

1937

He reports on the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American.

1940

He publishes The Big Sea, the first volume of his autobiography.

1943

Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple, first appears in his Chicago Defender column.

1947

He writes the lyrics for the Broadway opera Street Scene with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice.

1951

Montage of a Dream Deferred appears, including “Harlem” and “Theme for English B.”

1953

He testifies before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

1960

The NAACP awards him the Spingarn Medal.

1961

He is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and publishes Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.

1967

He dies in New York City on May 22, and The Panther and the Lash is published after his death.

1981

His Harlem home at 20 East 127th Street becomes a New York City landmark.

Life and Career

Hughes moved constantly for most of his life, and his travels shaped nearly everything he wrote.

A Wandering Childhood (1901–1920)

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1901, though he later gave his birth year as 1902. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, separated soon afterward, and his father left for Mexico. Hughes spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, whose first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, was killed after joining John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Her stories of abolitionist relatives, including Hughes’s great-uncle John Mercer Langston, gave him an early sense of pride and duty.

After his grandmother’s death, he lived with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, where his grammar school classmates elected him class poet, and then in Cleveland, Ohio. At Central High School, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and read Carl Sandburg, whose free verse and working-class subjects showed him what modern American poetry could sound like.

Rivers, Ships, and Harlem (1920–1925)

In the summer of 1920, on a train crossing the Mississippi on his way to visit his father in Mexico, Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Jessie Fauset published it in The Crisis in June 1921, and that fall he enrolled at Columbia University, which his father agreed to pay for only if he studied engineering. He found the campus unwelcoming and Harlem irresistible, and he left after a year.

Hughes then took a series of jobs that became material for his writing. In 1923, he sailed to West Africa as a crewman on the SS Malone, and in 1924, after months in Paris, he found himself stranded in Genoa, where he wrote “I, Too.” Back in the United States, he worked for the historian Carter G. Woodson and then as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. In 1925, “The Weary Blues” won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s poetry contest, and that December, the poet Vachel Lindsay read aloud three poems Hughes had left beside his dinner plate, and newspapers reported the discovery of a busboy poet.

The Harlem Renaissance (1926–1930)

Alfred A. Knopf published The Weary Blues in 1926, with help from the critic Carl Van Vechten. The same year, Hughes published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation, a manifesto declaring that young Black artists would express their “individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” He also enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1929.

His second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), leaned even harder on the blues and was attacked by Black critics who found its portraits of working-class life vulgar. With support from the wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Hughes toured the South with Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 and wrote his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), which won the Harmon Gold Medal. A break with Mason, and a bitter quarrel with Hurston over their play Mule Bone, closed this chapter of his life.

Radical Years and the Stage (1931–1940)

In the Depression years, Hughes moved sharply to the left. He toured the South reading his poems at Black colleges and churches, wrote Scottsboro Limited (1932) about the Scottsboro case, and in 1932 traveled to the Soviet Union with a group of Black Americans hired to make a film about race in America. The film was never made, but Hughes stayed more than a year and traveled through Central Asia. He wrote often for leftist publications, though he later testified that he had never joined the Communist Party.

His short story collection The Ways of White Folks appeared in 1934, and his play Mulatto opened on Broadway on October 24, 1935, running for 373 performances, the first long-running Broadway hit by a Black playwright. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year, reported on the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937, and in 1940 published The Big Sea, a memoir of his early life.

Simple, Harlem, and the Dream Deferred (1941–1959)

In the early 1940s, Hughes began a weekly column for the Chicago Defender that ran for about twenty years. In 1943, he introduced Jesse B. Semple, a Harlem everyman who talks over the news of the day at the neighborhood bar, and the Simple stories became his most popular prose, collected in books such as Simple Speaks His Mind (1950). His lyrics for the Broadway opera Street Scene (1947), written with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice, earned him enough to buy a house on East 127th Street in Harlem, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), a book-length sequence built on the rhythms of bebop, gave readers “Harlem” and its question about what happens to a dream deferred. In 1953, he was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where he said he had never been a Communist and distanced himself from his radical poems of the 1930s. Many on the left felt betrayed, and his Selected Poems (1959) left most of that work out.

Honors and Last Years (1960–1967)

The NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal in 1960, and in 1961 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He published Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), edited anthologies that introduced younger Black writers, and traveled to Africa and Europe to read his work.

Hughes died on May 22, 1967, at Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City, of complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His last collection, The Panther and the Lash, appeared later that year, and his ashes now rest beneath a floor medallion called “Rivers,” named for his first famous poem, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Poetry and Style

Hughes’s poems are built for the ear. He borrowed the repeated first line and answering third line of the blues stanza, the call and response of the Black church, and later the broken rhythms of bebop, and he kept his vocabulary plain enough that almost any listener can follow him on a first hearing. Many of his poems are spoken by characters, such as a mother on the stairs, a piano player on Lenox Avenue, or a student writing an essay, and he lets their voices carry the argument.

His subjects were the lives of ordinary Black Americans: work, love, church, music, money, segregation, and hopes that kept being postponed. He wrote about Harlem more than any other place, but he also wrote about the South, Africa, and the working poor of every color, and his anger at injustice sits side by side with humor and tenderness.

His plainness has costs. Hughes wrote quickly and a great deal, and some of his poems, especially the political verse of the 1930s, read more like slogans than art. Critics in his lifetime faulted him for not developing, and some readers find his later light verse thin. Even so, his best poems achieve an ease that more elaborate poets rarely manage.

Famous Poems and Books

These are the poems and books most readers meet first.

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921): Hughes’s first famous poem, which ties Black history to the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi.
• Mother to Son (1922): A mother’s monologue comparing her hard life to a staircase that has been no crystal stair.
• I, Too (1925): The “darker brother” sent to eat in the kitchen who promises to sit at America’s table.
• The Weary Blues (1926): His first collection, whose title poem brings a blues player on Lenox Avenue into print.
• Not Without Laughter (1930): A novel about a Black boy growing up in small-town Kansas, drawn from Hughes’s own childhood.
• The Ways of White Folks (1934): Short stories about the blind spots of white Americans in their dealings with Black people.
• Let America Be America Again (1936): A long poem that measures the American dream against the lives of the poor of every race.
• The Big Sea (1940): The first volume of his autobiography, covering his life up to 1930.
• Simple Speaks His Mind (1950): The first collection of his Jesse B. Semple stories from the Chicago Defender.
• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951): A book-length sequence set to the rhythms of bebop, including “Harlem” and “Theme for English B.”
• Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961): A long poem written to be performed with jazz, with musical cues printed in the margins.

Reputation and Legacy

Hughes’s standing has risen and fallen with the politics of each generation. In the 1920s, some Black critics called his blues poems an embarrassment, and in the 1960s, younger radicals found him too mild. Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume biography (1986 and 1988) and the Collected Poems (1994) helped settle his reputation, and he is now one of the most widely taught American poets.

His afterlife reaches well beyond the classroom. The phrase from “Harlem” about a dream drying up “like a raisin in the sun” gave Lorraine Hansberry the title of her 1959 play. His home on East 127th Street became a New York City landmark in 1981, the U.S. Postal Service put him on a stamp in 2002, and the words “I, too, am America” are carved on the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions people most often ask about Langston Hughes.

Who Was Langston Hughes?

Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist who became the best-known writer of the Harlem Renaissance. He is remembered for poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” and “Harlem,” which brought the rhythms of jazz and the blues into American poetry.

When and Where Was Langston Hughes Born?

Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. He later gave his birth year as 1902, which is why some older sources use that date.

What Is Langston Hughes’s Most Famous Poem?

His most famous poem is probably “Harlem” (1951), which opens with the question “What happens to a dream deferred?” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” and “Mother to Son” are close behind.

How Did Langston Hughes Die?

Hughes died of complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City. He was 66.

Was Langston Hughes Gay?

No one knows for certain. Hughes never married and kept his private life private; his main biographer, Arnold Rampersad, concluded that he was probably asexual, while other scholars read gay themes in some of his poems.

Related Poets

These poets shaped Hughes, worked beside him, or carried his example forward.

• Walt Whitman: The poet Hughes answered in “I, Too,” and his model for a large, democratic American voice.
• Carl Sandburg: The free-verse poet of Chicago workers whom Hughes studied in high school.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar: The earlier Black poet whose dialect verse Hughes admired and moved beyond.
• Claude McKay: A Harlem Renaissance contemporary who chose the sonnet where Hughes chose the blues.
• Countee Cullen: The Renaissance poet most often paired with Hughes, formal and traditional where Hughes was vernacular.
• Gwendolyn Brooks: A younger Chicago poet whom Hughes encouraged, and the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Sources

• Langston Hughes, Wikipedia
• Langston Hughes, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Langston Hughes Center, University of Kansas
• Langston Hughes: D.C.’s Original Busboy Poet, WETA Boundary Stones
• The Weary Blues (1926), Project Gutenberg