Langston Hughes Life During The Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance

When Langston Hughes left his native Midwest to attend Columbia University in 1921, he was excited about his new school's location in the Harlem community. Hughes had already heard about a place that was the "Negro capital of the world," and he knew that if ever he wanted to be a writer, his career would have to begin in Harlem. Hughes would become one of the major figures in the New Negro Renaissance—or Harlem Renaissance, as it is familiarly known. After his arrival, he would never call anyplace else home, and in many ways Hughes typifies what the Renaissance meant and what it allowed. Today his residence at 20 East 127th Street continues to attract young writers committed to producing the kind of art that made Hughes famous. …show more content…

As a result, the New Negro Renaissance is the most widely discussed period of African-American literary history not only because of ongoing scholarly debates over its origins, beginning, and end, but also because of its fundamental importance to twentieth-century thought and culture. The Renaissance coincided with the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Lost Generation, and its impact was keenly felt on an individual and collective level within the African-American community as well as on America's robust cultural industries, music, film, theater—all of which fully benefited from the creativity and newly discovered contributions of African