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James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. 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. As he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial ...
Jun 27, 2024 · Langston Hughes, American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and who vividly depicted the African American experience through his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. Learn more about Hughes’s life and work.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Langston Hughes (1901-67) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. Over the course of a varied career he was a novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, but it is for his poetry that Hughes is now best-remembered. But what are the best…
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a ...
Jan 24, 2023 · Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known ...
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is perhaps the best-known African American poet of the twentieth-century. Born in Joplin, Missouri, as a young man Hughes also spent time in Mexico, Chicago, and Kansas before returning to Cleveland ...
Few American artists loomed larger in the 20th century than Langston Hughes.He rode steamships to West Africa, toured the American South, traveled to Spain to cover the Civil War, rode the Trans-Siberian Railway, and saw his own reputation shift from Harlem Renaissance star in the 1920s to Communist activist poet in the 1930s to public figure in the 1960s. His literary output was similarly prodigious and unprecedented, and he was one of the first black poets to make a living solely from writing.
Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes’s sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual.
Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, was a prolific writer whose career spanned five decades. He emerged as a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, contributing to various literary forms, including poems, short stories, plays, and novels.. Hughes first gained recognition with his debut collection, ‘The Weary Blues,’ in 1926, which won him a scholarship and set the stage for his influential works like ‘Not Without Laughter‘ and ‘Harlem (A dream deferred)‘. He ...
