"Hughes' efforts to create a poetry that truly evoked the spirit of Black America
             involved a resolution of conflicts centering around the problem of identity" (Smith 358). No African American poet, writer, and novelist has ever been appreciated by every ethnic society as much as Langston Hughes was. Critics argue that Hughes reached that level of prominence, because all his works reflected on his life's experience, whether they have been good or bad. He never wrote one single literary piece that did not contain an underlying message within the specific work; in other words, all his works had a definite purpose behind them. Providing that the reader has some insight about the life of this great poet, he can readily arrive to the conclusion that Hughes' life effected his works to the fullest extent, even when only breezing through Langston Hughes' works.
             Langston Hughes, "one of the most original and versatile of twentieth-century black writers" (Shirley 1), was born on February 1st, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. When Hughes was still a baby, his father, James Nathaniel Hughes, abandoned the family and left for Mexico. As soon as she divorced her husband, his mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, a schoolteacher struggling to acquire a permanent job position, had to place him under the caring arm of his grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary. Hughes' grandmother "helped inspire in him a devotion to the cause of social justice" (Rampersad 55), for her first husband died fighting at Harpers Ferry under John Brown, and her second husband became a fierce abolitionist. Being always a lonely child, Hughes turned to reading and poetry early in his life. Developing a great respect for writers like Paul Dunbar and Carl Sandburg, he soon began writing his own poems. Shortly after submitting a few poems to the school's magazine editor, Hughes' poems could be read by everyone at Central High School, a local Cleveland school he was attending....