Langston hughes images biography

On his father’s side, Hughes had two white great-grandfathers. One was Silas Cushenberry—a Jewish slave trader from Kentucky; the other was Sam Clay, a distiller of Scotch ancestry who was rumored to have been a relative of the renowned Kentucky senator Henry Clay.

Hughes’s parents separated shortly after he was born. Charles moved to Mexico to escape white mob violence in Joplin. When Hughes was five or six, his parents reconciled briefly when Charles invited him, Carrie, and Mary to live with him in Mexico City. After a massive earthquake, Carrie returned to Kansas with her mother and son. Hughes did not see his father again until he was seventeen. Some years later, Carrie married Homer Clark, an occasional chef from Topeka, Kansas who also supported the family with odd jobs in steel mills and coal mines. Together, Carrie and Homer had a son.

Hughes was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas until he was Mary was a conductor on the Underground Railroad with her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, one of the men who helped John Brown attack Harpers Ferry. Hughes had difficult relationships with both of his parents and his grandmother. He claimed that he despised his father, whose expressed loathing for other Black people led Hughes to become estranged from him. In the summer of , Carrie invited her son to move to Lincoln, Illinois. Hughes spent the next several years living with her there, in Cleveland, and in Chicago.

Hughes began writing poetry after he returned to Cleveland as a high school sophomore. He contributed verse to the school magazine, Central High Monthly, and later became its editor. He listed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg among his main poetic influences. After he graduated from high school, he composed one of his best-known poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” He then went to central Mexico for a year to spend time with his father and study Spanish. Meanwhile, Hughes sent thr

Early Life

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 “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in , he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“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.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City. He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry han

About the Sitter

Born in Joplin, Missouri, in , Langston Hughes said, “My earliest memories of written words were those of W.E.B. Du Bois and the Bible.” After graduating from high school, Hughes accompanied his father to Mexico. Crossing the Mississippi River by train, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem chronicling the African American journey from ancient to modern history. He sent the poem to Crisis, the magazine Du Bois edited. He asked, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

Leaving Columbia University after a year, Hughes visited Africa and then lived in Paris, sending work home for publication. His first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in

As the Harlem Renaissance reached full bloom in the s, debate raged in local and national publications about art and literature’s role in expressing African American identities and overcoming stereotypical depictions. Hughes was hailed by some as the movement’s poet laureate. Others criticized him because of his use of realistic dialect and vivid depictions of nightclub and street scenes. Hughes actively participated in this intellectual debate but did not hesitate to realistically and sensitively portray the “low-down folks,” as he called them, in his poems, essays, short stories, plays, novels, and newspaper columns. Eventually publishing more than forty books, Hughes never lost touch with the working people.

About the Portrait

Artist Winold Reiss was born in Germany. Arriving in New York City in , he soon began creating sensitive representations of African Americans and Native Americans. Reiss’s depictions avoided the racist stereotypes common at the time. This portrait, along with others created by Reiss, illustrated Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation, a collection of Harlem literary works.

In this image, Langston Hughes appears deep in thought before an open notebook. He is well dressed, a

During the Harlem Renaissance, which took place roughly from the s to the mid-'30s, many Black artists flourished as public interest in their work took off. One of the Renaissance's leading lights was poet and author Langston Hughes.

Hughes not only made his mark in this artistic movement by breaking boundaries with his poetry, he drew on international experiences, found kindred spirits amongst his fellow artists, took a stand for the possibilities of Black art and influenced how the Harlem Renaissance would be remembered.

Hughes stood up for Black artists

George Schuyler, the editor of a Black paper in Pittsburgh, wrote the article "The Negro-Art Hokum" for an edition of The Nation in June

The article discounted the existence of "Negro art," arguing that African-American artists shared European influences with their white counterparts, and were, therefore, producing the same kind of work. Spirituals and jazz, with their clear links to Black performers, were dismissed as folk art.

Invited to make a response, Hughes penned "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In it, he described Black artists rejecting their racial identity as "the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America." But he declared that instead of ignoring their identity, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

This clarion call for the importance of pursuing art from a Black perspective was not only the philosophy behind much of Hughes' work, but it was also reflected throughout the Harlem Renaissance.

Some critics called Hughes' poems "low-rate"

Hughes broke new ground in poetry when he began to write verse that incorporated how Black people talked and the jazz and blues music they played. He led the way in harnessing the blues form in poetry with "The Weary Blues,&q