Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on the first of February 1901. He was raised principally by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, and later by his mother in Cleveland. He took his undergraduate degree at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) in 1929, having already published his first collection, The Weary Blues (1926), to immediate critical success.

He was the central poet of the Harlem Renaissance — the cultural movement that gave Black American letters its first sustained twentieth-century identity, centered on Harlem in the 1920s and early 1930s. His poems incorporated the rhythms of jazz and the blues, the cadences of Black church oratory, and the speech of Black working people, and made all of them admissible to American literary discourse for the first time.

He produced sixteen books of poetry, eleven plays, two novels, an autobiography, and the syndicated newspaper column featuring his fictional Harlem narrator Jesse B. Semple — "Simple" — that ran in the Chicago Defender for twenty-three years. He translated the work of Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Léopold Sédar Senghor.

The poem "Harlem" (1951) — "What happens to a dream deferred?" — supplied Lorraine Hansberry her title for A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

He died in New York on the twenty-second of May 1967, age sixty-six.

He is honored here as the poet who brought the rhythms of Black American speech into the literary canon.