Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues and jazz into
words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet, novelist, journalist, and
Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was
brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband
(Hughes's grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social
As a lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while
in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University, but left after an
unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe,
a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis
(NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to
combine the traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly because of the depression Hughes became a socialist in
the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he wrote many radical poems and essays in
magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year in the Soviet Union.
In 1939 Hughes moved away from the political scene. During the war he supported the
Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a collection of poems Shakespeare in
Harlem (1942). He attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black weekly Chicago
Defender, where he created a comic but keen black urban Every man, Jesse B. Semple.3
In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene,
Hughes received great success. Hu...