Poet, novelist, playwright, activist — Langston Hughes seemed to have done it all and throughout everything, he managed to touch, entertain and impress audiences everywhere with his innovative writing styles and his unashamed views of the state of African-Americans in the United States.
Born on May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes came from an ancestry of both slaves and slave owners. His father left the family when Langston was still young and moved to Latin America in an attempt to avoid the racism he faced in the United States. Langston’s mother took a job and as a result, Langston was raised by his grandmother who instilled in him a fierce racial pride.
Hughes attended Columbia University, but left before graduating due to the increasing racism he faced. He travelled to Paris where he became a part of the infamous group of ex-patriots who fled to Europe. He eventually returned to the states to live with his elderly mother and enrolled in Lincoln University from where he earned his B.A.
For most of the rest of his life Langston Hughes lived in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood where he become one of the fathers of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement that gave bloom to African-American writing. He is credited with inventing a new style of poetry called jazz poetry, which combined elements of popular jazz music and traditional poetry. This literary form has always been considered an “outsider” art form and was popular with the Beat generation of the ’50s and has evolved into modern hip-hop music and poetry slams.
Hughes never married or had children and many historians and biographers believe that he was a homosexual and that he left clues alluding to this fact in his poetry. Langston Hughes died in 1967 after suffering complications from a surgery related to prostate cancer.
Check out the poems of Langston Hughes here.