Langston hughes bio poem

Home / General Biography Information / Langston hughes bio poem

An expanded version of the speciall issue would be printed in the fall as The New Negro: an Intepretation. 
May 1925: Hughes' poem "The Weary Blues" wins first prize in the Opportunity Magazine poetry context. Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically Black university outside of Philadelphia, and completed a B.A.

degree there in 1929. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes describes writing the poem while on a train to Mexico in the summer of 1920 (see an excerpt from The Big Sea here). 

During that same time period (1920-1921), Hughes was very active publishing poems, essays, and a short play in The Brownies' Book, a magazine for children of color edited by W.E.B.

Langston Hughes High School, completed in 2009 and located in Fairburn, Georgia, is named after the poet. He left the ship in 1924 and lived for a brief time in Paris, where he continued to develop and publish his poetry.

Poems, Books, and Other Works

Hughes was one of the first Black Americans to earn a living as writer.

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.

His birth date—likely February 1, 1901—is the subject of some debate. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 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.

In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. It opens:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, and Martin Luther King Jr.

referenced it in a number of his speeches.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Hughes published countless other works, including several books in his “Simple” series, English translations of the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral, another anthology of his own poetry, and the second installment of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander.

He also wrote short story collections, novels, plays, two autobiographies, and even children’s books. The play debuted at the Little Theater in November 1963 with cast members including Louis Gossett Jr., Clara Ward, Hilda Simms, and Rosetta LeNoire. He works as a cook, and according to his account in The Big Sea lives for a time with a Russian dancer named Sonya. 
March 1924: Hughes publishes "The White Ones" in Opportunity.

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.

During the 1930s, Hughes was at his most politically radical, and frequently contributed to Communist journals. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.