James Mercer Langston Hughes, or known by multiple as Langston Hughes was a poet, social activist, novelist, columnist, and playwright. His playwrights include: “Simply Heaven,” “Soul Gone Home,” “Street Scene,” “Tambourines to Glory,” and “Black Nativity” which was later, in 2013, turned into a movie. A source (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes) titles Langston Hughes as a “central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.” Along with poems and plays, Hughes authored novels, short stories, and essays. An essay written by Langston Hughes, entitled, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is an example of what Langston Hughes favored to display in his poems. He portrayed the “joys and hardships of working-class black lives” trying to avoid idealization and negative stereotypes.
Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902. Sources claim, his father, James Hughes abandoned him and his mother, Carolina (Carrie) Mercer Langston, and moved to Mexico due to his dislike of American racism and black American culture at the time. Also, a specific source claims, his father, Langston Hughes’ father, departed to Mexico also because of his desire to practice law and wanted to escape the racial prejudice in America(http://edwardchrisproject.weebly.com/hardships.html). His mother moved around searching for steady employment after “elder Hughes” left. After a while, Langston Hughes lived with his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas until her death in 1915. He also worked while living with his grandmother because his grandmother was making enough. She did have a traditional occupation. After the death of his grandmother he went to live with friends of the family, James and Mary Reed and that coming summer, he moved with his mother and her husband, Homer Clark, in Lincoln, Illinois before they settled in Cleveland, Ohio.
During high school, Langston Hughes began to write poetry. Hughes’ first pieces of verse was published in his high school’s magazine, Monthly. It is claimed, his first piece of jazz poetry, “When Sue Wears Red,” was written while he was in high school. His talents were recognized by peers and teachers; Hughes’ poetic influence came from poets he was introduced to by an English teacher, at his high school, who were: Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, and, in some sources, Paul Laurence Dunbar. After high school, Langston Hughes spent the summers of 1919 and 1920 with his father in Mexico. In fact, while traveling on the train to visit his father again in Mexico, during the summer of 1920, he wrote his first “mature poem” entitled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It is stated, in a source, Langston Hughes was inspired to write this poem when the train crossed the Mississippi River, and years after its publication, dedicated the poem to W.E.B. Dubois and also was read at Hughes’ funeral service.
While in Mexico, Hughes explained to his father his desires of being a writer even though his father’s desires for him did not match. Langston Hughes’ father became impressed with his son’s poetry, he decided to pay Langston Hughes’ college tuition at Columbia University for one year as long as Langston Hughes studies engineering. After a year at Columbia University, Langston Hughes dropped out because of “racial prejudice,” or racism, on the campus, describes sources. After Columbia University, Langston Hughes taken multiple jobs. He was a cook, a waiter, a truck farmer, a seaman as he was aboard on the S.S. Malone, a doorman at a nightclub in Paris, where he stayed for six months, and then was working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Hughes’ break happened when Langston decided to slip three of his poems “into the satchel,” written by one source, of Vachel Lindsay. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, who is an American poet, the founder modern of singing poetry, and famous for his performances of poetry, was enthused by Langston Hughes, which, down the line, resulted in a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1929. Also, Langston Hughes was classmates with Thurgood Marshall and pledge Omega Psi Phi.
Langston Hughes’ first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 and his second, Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927. Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, was published in 1930 and in 1932, Langston Hughes traveled to work on a film, never completed, with African-Americans to the Soviet Union about the black experience in America(https://www.shmoop.com/langston-hughes/timeline.html). Langston Hughes received the Guggenheim Fellowship award, in 1935, as well as, opening his first play, The Mulatto, on Broadway in the same year. Hughes, throughout the years opens theaters, one in New York City, The Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1938, the New Negro Theater in Los Angeles in 1939, where he co-writes the screenplay for his first film, Way Down South, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1942. Also, Langston Hughes began to win multiple awards for his works, for the instance, the Rosenwald Fellowship (1941), his book, Simple Takes a Wife, (1954), wins the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, “which honors writing that tackles racism and diversity.” In addition to his awards, he won the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1960 for “outstanding achievement by a black American.”
Joseph McCarthy, a Republican U.S. Senator, better known for his list of 205 names of known communists in the U.S. state department in 1950. His “aggressive anticommunist pursuits” made him the namesake for McCarthyism. On March 24, 1953, Langston Hughes testified before Joseph McCarthy and the Subcommittee. African Americans who voiced objections towards the treatment of blacks at the time, were suspect to McCarthy. Langston Hughes, being a radical poet, was questioned by McCarthy but then was dismissed, because the Subcommittee sensed they were better without attacking him. Possibly, after hearing his statement to defend himself.
Conclusively, besides being questioned about communism, Langston Hughes was, agreed by biographers, a homosexual. It was claimed, by a source, Langston Hughes used gay codes in his writings, similar to Walt Whitman(https://www.uis.edu/gendersexualitystudentservices/langstonhughes/). The source restated a statement voiced by Hughes’ principle biographer Arnold Rampersad, “Hughes found some young men, especially dark-skinned men, appealing and sexually fascinating.” Langston Hughes wrote unpublished love poems, stated by the source, to a man he called “Beauty and also wrote poems “To F.S.” who is thought to be a sailor from Jamaica, by the name of Ferdinand Smith, whom Langston Hughes met in the 1920’s and kept in touch with for over 30 years.