August 21, 2006
Langston Hughes
A pro
lific poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, James Langston Hughes was a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s of unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievement among black Americans. Hughes integrated the rhythm and mood of jazz and blues music into his work and used colloquial language to reflect working-class African American culture. His often-bestowed title of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” reflects the extent to which Hughes’ career both shaped and was shaped by the music, art and lifestyle of black Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. Unlike many of his fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, Hughes continued to write into the 1950’s. He died in New York City May 22, 1967.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri but grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and Lincoln, Illinois before attending high school in Cleveland, Ohio. Hughes’ father and mother separated not long after his birth and his father, a successful businessman, emigrated to Mexico. Hughes was one of the first writers and artists drawn to Harlem in the 1920’s by the sudden growth of African American cultural activity there. He arrived in New York in September 1921, ostensibly to attend Colu
mbia University, although he only lasted a year in school. In 1926 Hughes published The Weary Blues, his first collection of verse. Hughes’ early influences include Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson. However, unlike previous poets, Hughes worked to adapt traditional poetic forms to blues and jazz music. This lead to an inventively rhythmic free verse. His landmark poem, “The Weary Blues,” was the first by any poet to make use of the basic blues form.
In 192
6 Hughes returned to school, this time to the historically black Lincoln Un
iversity in Pennsylvania where he graduated in 1929. After graduation, Hughes became increasingly involved in the Communist party which lead to his being investigated by the Senate subcommittee chaired by Joseph McCarthy in 1953. In 1940 Hughes published his hugely influential autobiography, The Big Sea, which recounted many of his experiences in Harlem during the ‘20s.
(Adapted from “Langston Hughes,” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. 1251-1254.)
Langston Hughes Web Resources:
Modern American Poetry Site
This site, edited by Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is a an online companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000). It includes a biography, criticism and several of Hughes’ poems and writings.
The Academy of American Poets
This site includes a biography, several of Hughes’ poems and related prose.
Yale New Haven Teachers Institute Curriculum Unit
This curriculum unit, compiled by G. Casey Cassidy, includes an extensive biography and a long bibliography (both for teachers and students), but includes only a few suggested in-class activities. It is geared towards grades 7-12.
Internet School Library Media Center
This is a teacher resource file for the Langston Hughes. It includes biographies, lesson plans and useful links.
[…] “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was one of the first of the Harlem Renaissance poets to incorporate jazz, spirituals and the blues into his writing. In the 1920’s Hughes steeped himself in the jazz culture of Harlem and began to weave the rhythm and feeling of Harlem jazz into his poetry. Perhaps his most obvious incorporation of the new music was Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues,” published first in 1923 in New York’s Amsterdam News and two years later in Hughes’ first collection The Weary Blues. […]
[…] Major figures in the Harlem Renaissance were Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, many of whom treated the themes of black life in a way that felt modern, while borrowing elements from the folk literature of black tradition. Visual artists of the Renaissance, including Aaron Douglas and William H. Johnson, incorporated African and primitive motifs into their work. Among the magazines founded at the time which devoted themselves to ‘Negro studies’ were Crisis (edited by DuBois), Opportunity, and the Messenger. […]