American novelist, poet, and playwright Langston Hughes was born in Joplin Missouri in February 1902. Soon after he was born, his parents separated, and his father moved away to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, until her death. After she died, he began to write poetry and Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg were major early influences in his work. After he graduated from high school in 1920 Hughes spent the next year with his father in Mexico. His first greatly praised poem was called "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" which was published in Crisis Magazine. In 1921 Hughes came back to America and enrolled in Columbia University. He studied there for a while but soon got involved in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1922 he dropped out of …show more content…
The Second volume to Hughes poetry was published in 1927, “Fine Clothes to the Jew”. With these two books Hughes established himself as a Huge Part of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, he provided the movement with a declaration when he claimed the need for both racial pride and artistic independence in, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." After college graduation in 1929, Hughes published his first novel “Not without Laughter”. The book sold enough copies to make him believe that he could make a living as a writer. Hughes later went on to publish a collection of short stories, “The Ways of White Folks”. He worked as a war correspondent for some American newspapers during the Spanish Civil …show more content…
The money Hughes earned from the musical was enough to pay for a house in Harlem. He taught creative writing at Atlanta University and was also a guest lecturer at a Chicago university. During the last years of his life, Hughes went on to write a play which was the basis for the opera “Trouble Island”. He published “The Poetry of the Negro” as well as many other books in the “Simple” series and working on the English translation of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Gabriela Misgtral.
Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967 from prostate cancer. Jazz and blues music was played at his funeral and his ashes were buried in Harlem under the entrance of the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black culture in Harlem. The inscription is from Hughes 's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." It reads: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
Hughes 's Harlem home, in 1981, became a New York City Landmark and in 1982, was added to the National Register of Places. Throughout the world volumes of Langston Hughes work are continuously published and