Langston Hughes: A Jazz Poet

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Langston Hughes (James Mercer Langston Hughes) was a poet, columnist, dramatist, essayist, lyricist, and novelist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes, like others, was active in the Harlem Renaissance, and he had a strong sense of racial pride. Through his poem, novels, short stories, plays, and kids books, he promoted equality, condemned racism, and injustice, and celebrated African American culture, and humor. (Illinois).

Langston Hughes was the son of Carrie Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes. He was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. Langston Hughes grew up in a series of small Midwestern towns. Hughes’ father divorced Langston’s mother, Carrie. Then his father traveled to Mexico and Cuba, seeking to escape the worsening racism in the United States. After his parents separated, his mother searched for a job; his grandmother raised young Langston. He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. After his grandma passed, he went to live with his family friends. James and Mary Reed for two years. Langston was very sad living with his grandmother; he even expressed his sorrow in many of his poems. In “The Big Sea”, he wrote, “ I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonely, living with my grandmother.“ (Poetry Vol. 13).

Later, Hughes lived with his mother in Lincoln, Ohio. She had remarried when he was a boy; the family eventually lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school. While Langston was in high school, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper. Some of his major early influences were Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, as well as the black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was a master of both dialect and standard verse. Claude McKay, a radic...

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... died from complications after abdominal

surgery, related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. Langston Hughes was perhaps the most original of African American poets in the breadth and variety of his work, assuredly the most representative of African American writers. (Purdue).

Works Cited

"Hughes's Life and Career--by Arnold Rampersad." Hughes's Life and Career--by Arnold Rampersad. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

"Langston Hughes." Langston Hughes. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

"Langston Hughes." Langston Hughes. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

"Langston Hughes." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

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