Langston Hughes Biography

Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He was born into the African culture and grew up in his home town with his mother and father. Although he grew up as a child mostly with his grandparents rather than his parents. His mother and father split up when he was such a young age, they split and his dad moved away. His mother traveled around to find a job and his dad moved to Mexico leaving Langston with his grandmother. At such a young age growing up with his grandparents he was influence by all his grandmothers’ stories she told him. That inspired him to look into poetry as a child. He began to study in the African culture and dug a little deeper into his interests after he listened to the stories his grandmother told.

He picked up on poetry during the Harlem Renaissance and not long after his grandmother passed away he began finishing his schooling and starting poems, “While Hughes’s mother moved around during his youth, Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary, until she died in his early teens. From that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. It was during this time that Hughes first began to write poetry, and that one of his teachers first introduced him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, both whom Hughes would later cite as primary influences,” (“Langston Hughes Biography”). Langston Hughes took what he knew from his grandmother’s stories and from what his teachers taught him and put it together with poetry. Most of his poems represent racism. The poem the “negro speaks of rivers” was one of his poems that really focused on

His poems really show his feeling through them. They also flash into his life and around the time he grew up. One of the poems is “Negro Speaks of Rivers” and in this poem you can really focus in on his own thoughts and views. This essay really shows that the African culture has seen the biggest changes is the times of history. He also mentions a part of slavery in his poem, the speaker says “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln / went down to New Orleans,” (Hughes 8). Another poem Langston wrote is “You and Your Whole Race”. This poem really opens the eyes and the views on life. It also speaks out to people about how everyone is treated differently than they actually should. In this poem the speaker mentions, “Look down upon the town in which you live / And be ashamed,” (Hughes 2-3). They continue to repeat “And Be Ashamed” (3 repeated on 6). This really sets out as he is mentioning things that have happened to people of a different race and how they should be ashamed of how they treat other people. And The last poem That stuck out