Full Name
Date of Birth and Death
Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri, and he died on May 22, 1967, in New York City.
Early Life
Hughes’s parents, [James Nathaniel Hughes] and [Carrie Langston Hughes], divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, [Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston], who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to [Lincoln, Illinois] [1].
Career and Contributions
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the [Harlem Renaissance], a flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes[4].
Hughes was one of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry and was best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing[3].
Legacy
Langston Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together made him a significant literary figure. He never lost his conviction that “most people are generally good,” and his work continues to be celebrated for its profound simplicity and its portrayal of the African American experience[4].
Sources
Citations: [1] https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes [2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Langston-Hughes [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes [4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes [5] https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/langston-hughes