Langston Hughes

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Image:Hughes.jpg Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and newspaper columnist. He is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

1 Life
2 Career
3 Political views
4 Bibliography
5 References
6 External links

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Life

Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, the son of Carrie Langston Hughes, a teacher, and her husband, James Hughes. After a divorce, James Hughes left the United States for Mexico due to enduring racism. In Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry by Onwuchekwa Jemie, Hughes is quoted as saying his father, a white man, "despised Negroes." This distant relationship with his father heavily influenced his work. After the separation of his parents, young Langston was raised mainly by his grandmother Mary Langston, a longtime activist. He spent most of childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, and he began to write poetry when he was 13. His childhood was not a happy one, but it was one that heavily influenced the poet he would become. He lived with his by-then-remarried mother as an adolescent in Lincoln, Illinois; it was there that he discovered his love of books. Upon graduating from high school in 1919, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his father, but he was unhappy there and often contemplated suicide. His father did not support his ambition to write, believing that he would not be able to make a living at it. So, he encouraged Hughes to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son's tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a year, Langston dropped out with a B+ average because of racial tensions within the institution, but, he continued writing poetry. He served a brief tenure as a ship's steward, traveling to West and Central Africa and Europe. After returning to the states, Hughes eventually enrolled in and, in 1929, graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically Black institution. Hughes received a B.A. degree from Lincoln University, and was later awarded a Lit.D. in 1943. Barring numerous travels that included parts of the Caribbean and West Indies, the neighborhood of Harlem would serve as the primary home of Hughes for the reminder of his life. In New York City on May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer at the age of 65.

On the issue of the sexual orientation of Hughes, academics and biographers generally agree that Hughes was gay and included gay codes into many of his poems similar in manner to Walt Whitman and most patently in the short story Blessed Assurance. Arnold Rampersad, the main biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African American men in his work and life.

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Career

Unlike specific writers of the post-WWI era who became identified as the Lost Generation, writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, Hughes instead spent time in Paris during the early 1920s becoming part of the black expatriate community. For most of 1924 he lived at 15 Rue de Nollet. In November 1924 Hughes moved to Washington D.C. His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926 containing what would become the signature poem of Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Richard Bruce Nugent. Hughes and his comptemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class and the three considered the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B. Dubois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain Locke, who they accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture for social equality. Of primary conflict were the depictions of the "low-life," that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. Hughes wrote what would be considered the manifesto for himself and his comtemporaries published in The Nation in 1926, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express

our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.

If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,

it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.

The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people

are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure

doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,

strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain

free within ourselves.

His poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. Hughes cited as influences on his poetry the American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman.

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Hughes first collection of short stories came in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. Through the black publication Chicago Defender, Hughes in 1943 gave creative birth to Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled Simple, the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. He was offered to teach at a number of colleges, but seldom did. In 1947, Hughes taught a semester at the predominantly black Atlanta University. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, works for children, and, with the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English. Much of his writing was inspired by the blues and jazz of that era, the music he believed to be the true expression of the black spirit; an example is "Harlem" (sometimes called "Dream Deferred") from Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), from which a line was taken for the title of the play Raisin in the Sun.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

During the mid 1950s and 1960s, Hughes popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. He in turn found a number of writers like James Baldwin lacking in this same pride, over intellectualizing in their work, and occasionally vulgar. As the sixites progress along with a rise in the Black Power Movement, though he was able to understand, he believe some of the younger black writers were too angry in their work. Hughes' posthumously published Panther and the Lash in 1967 was intended to show solidarity and understanding with these writers but with more skill and absent of the most virile anger. Hughes still continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers who he often helped by offering advice to and introducing to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, who happened to include Alice Walker who Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated in degrees and tones within their own work.

In 1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American. Hughes was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. In 1973, the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York.

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Political views

Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem A New Song:

I speak in the name of the black millions

Awakening to action.

Let all others keep silent a moment

I have this word to bring,

This thing to say,

This song to sing:

Bitter was the day

When I bowed my back

Beneath the slaver's whip.

That day is past.

Bitter was the day

When I saw my children unschooled,

My young men without a voice in the world,

My women taken as the body-toys

Of a thieving people.

That day is past.

Bitter was the day, I say,

When the lyncher's rope

Hung about my neck,

And the fire scorched my feet,

And the oppressors had no pity,

And only in the sorrow songs

Relief was found.

That day is past.

I know full well now

Only my own hands,

Dark as the earth,

Can make my earth-dark body free.

O thieves, exploiters, killers,

No longer shall you say

With arrogant eyes and scornful lips:

"You are my servant,

Black man-

I, the free!"

That day is past-

For now,

In many mouths-

Dark mouths where red tongues burn

And white teeth gleam-

New words are formed,

Bitter

With the past

But sweet

With the dream.

Tense,

Unyielding,

Strongand sure,

They sweep the earth-

Revolt! Arise!

The Black

And White World

Shall be one!

The Worker's World!

The past is done!

A new dream flames

Against the

Sun!

In 1933, Hughes became part of a group of disparate blacks who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of most blacks living in the United States at the time. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. Hughes would also manage to travel to China and Japan before returning home to the States.

Hughes' poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys and support of the Spanish Republic. Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, even though he was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a statement in 1938 supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in WWII. Hughes initially did not favor black American involvment in the war because of the irony of U.S. Jim Crow laws existing at the same time a war was being fought against Fascism and the Axis Powers. He came to support the war effort and black American involvement in it after coming to understand that blacks would also be contributing to their struggle for civil rights at home.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Following his appearance, he distanced himself from Communism and was subsequently rebuked by some who had previously supported him on the Radical Left.

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Bibliography

Poetry

The Weary Blues. Knopf, 1926
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. Knopf, 1932
Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play. N.Y.: Golden Stair Press, 1932
Shakespeare in Harlem. Knopf, 1942
Montage of a Dream Deferred. Holt, 1951
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Knopf, 1994

Fiction

Not Without Laughter. Knopf, 1930
The Ways of White Folks. Knopf, 1934
Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952
Something in Common and Other Stories. Hill & Wang, 1963
Short Stories of Langston Hughes. Hill & Wang, 1996

Other

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1958.
Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes. Lawrence Hill, 1973.
The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940.
I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956.
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. by Emily Bernard.Knopf 2001
Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Faith Berry.Citadel Press 1983, 1992
The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol.2 1941-1967 I dream a world. Arnold Rampersad.New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
Encyclopedia of The Harlem Renaissance. Sandra West Aberjhani.Checkmark Books 2003
A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. Crown Publishers, Inc.

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References

Rampersad, Arnold (1988). The Life of Langston Hughes Volume 2: I Dream A World. In Ask Your Mama!, p.336. Oxford University Press
Schwarz, Christa A.B. (2003). Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. In Langston Hughes: A "true 'people's poet",pp.68-88.Indiana University Press
Joyce, Joyce A. (2004). A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. In Steven C. Tracy (Ed.), Hughes and Twentieth-Century Genderracial Issues, p.136. Oxford University Press

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