Author langston hughes biography harlem
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Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, , in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from to after new research from uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.
After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November , he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The We • Hughes was born February 1, (although some evidence shows it may have been ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland. According to the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote. In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called • Langston Hughes (–) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England. Hughes returned to the United States in and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in His first poem was published in in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues in Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In , he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation: “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to något som utförs snabbt exempelvis expressleverans our individual dark-skinned selves
Early Life