Bio of james langston hughes
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The inscription marking the spot features a line from Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It reads: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
Hughes’ Harlem home, on East 127th Street, received New York City Landmark status in 1981 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
All -isms have influenced me one way or another, and I can not answer to any specific -ism, because I am not familiar with the details of them and have not read their literature,” Hughes told counsel Roy Cohn, according to transcripts.
Death and Legacy
On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications of prostate cancer at age 66. But because of Hughes’ secrecy and the era’s homophobia surrounding openly gay men, there is no concrete evidence of Hughes’ sexuality.
Accusations of Communism
Langston Hughes testifies in front of the Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953.
According to The New York Times, the House Un-American Activities Committee accused Hughes of being affiliated at one time or another with 91 different communist organizations.
Except for travels to the Caribbean and West Indies, Harlem was Hughes' primary home for the rest of his life.
Hughes achieved fame as a literary luminary during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
His birth date—likely February 1, 1901—is the subject of some debate. The book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his commitment to Black themes and heritage. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In New York City, he quickly became a part of Harlem’s burgeoning cultural movement, what is commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Dive Deeper
The young poet dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and worked various odd jobs around New York for the following year, before signing on as a steward on a freighter that took him to Africa and Spain.
Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors.
The collection also featured the poems “Theme for English B” and “Ballad of the Landlord.”
“Harlem” examines how the American Dream can fall short for African Americans. From that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”
Langston Hughes
1902-1967
Who Was Langston Hughes?
Poet and writer Langston Hughes became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance after his first poem was published in 1921.
His father abandoned the family and left for Cuba, then Mexico, due to enduring racism in the United States. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon Foundation’s gold medal for literature.
Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s.
There were other little white kids, 6 and 7 years old, who picked up stones and threw them back at their fellow classmates and defend me and saw that I got home safely. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America.
He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University) and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months.
Over the next two decades, Hughes continued his prolific output.
The success of the musical earned Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. In 1949, he wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work titled The Poetry of the Negro. Hughes showed some of his poems to Lindsay, who was impressed enough to use his connections to promote Hughes’ poetry and ultimately bring it to a wider audience.
His ashes are interred beneath the foyer floor of the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.