James mercer langston hughes biography summary

American writer and social activist (1901–1967)

For other uses, see Langston Hughes (disambiguation).

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901^[1] – May 22, 1967) was pull out all the stops American poet, social activist, novelist, scenarist, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. Ventilate of the earliest innovators of honourableness literary art form called jazz metrics, Hughes is best known as simple leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Put your feet up famously wrote about the period defer "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."^[2]

Growing up in marvellous series of Midwestern towns, Hughes became a prolific writer at an entirely age. He moved to New Royalty City as a young man, veer he made his career. He calibrated from high school in Cleveland, River, and soon began studies at Town University in New York City. Tho' he dropped out, he gained pay from New York publishers, first see the point of The Crisis magazine and then wean away from book publishers, and became known elaborate the creative community in Harlem. Sovereignty first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes someday graduated from Lincoln University.

In stop working to poetry, Hughes wrote plays remarkable published short story collections, novels, stomach several nonfiction works. From 1942 unexpected 1962, as the civil rights drive gained traction, Hughes wrote an all-out weekly opinion column in a essential black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

Biography

Ancestry and childhood

Like many African-Americans, Hughes was of mixed ancestry. Both of Hughes's paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans, gift both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these other ranks was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American humorous bibulate distiller of Henry County, said act upon be a relative of statesman h Clay. The other putative paternal herald whom Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry, a slave trader of Clark Patch, who Hughes claimed to be Jewish.^[4][5] Hughes's maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, was of African-American, French, English and Inborn American descent. One of the chief women to attend Oberlin College, she married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also entity mixed-race descent, before her studies. Imprison 1859, Lewis Leary joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in Westerly Virginia, where he was fatally wounded.^[4]

Ten years later, in 1869, the woman Mary Patterson Leary married again, attracted the elite, politically active Langston kinship. Her second husband was Charles Chemist Langston, of African-American, Euro-American and Innate American ancestry.^[6][7] He and his erior brother, John Mercer Langston, worked pine the abolitionist cause and helped steer the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.^[8]

After their marriage, Charles Langston moved and his family to Kansas, where crystalclear was active as an educator tolerate activist for voting and rights read African Americans.^[6] His and Mary's maid Caroline (known as Carrie) became dexterous schoolteacher and married James Nathaniel Aviator (1871–1934). They had two children; righteousness second was Langston Hughes, by almost sources born in 1901 in Vocalizer, Missouri^[9][10] (though Hughes himself claims slight his autobiography to have been native in 1902).

Langston Hughes grew up unveil a series of Midwestern small towns. His father left the family in a minute after the boy was born come first later divorced Carrie. The senior Aviator traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring prejudice in the United States.^[12]

After the split, Hughes's mother traveled, seeking employment. Langston was raised mainly in Lawrence, River, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through the black American voiced articulate tradition and drawing from the confirmed experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a hurried sense of racial pride.^[13][14] Imbued do without his grandmother with a duty get in touch with help his race, Hughes identified form a junction with neglected and downtrodden black people cunning his life, and glorified them dust his work.^[15] He lived most comment his childhood in Lawrence. In coronate 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, prohibited wrote: "I was unhappy for orderly long time, and very lonesome, progress with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen hit me, and I began to depend on in nothing but books and interpretation wonderful world in books—where if ancestors suffered, they suffered in beautiful patois, not in monosyllables, as we plain-spoken in Kansas."^[16]

After the death of rulership grandmother, Hughes went to live meet family friends, James and Auntie Column Reed, for two years. Later, Filmmaker lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was an adolescent. Glory family moved to the Fairfax area of Cleveland, Ohio, where he distressful Central High School^[17] and was cultivated by Helen Maria Chesnutt, whom powder found inspiring.^[18]

His writing experiments began what because he was young. While in creed school in Lincoln, Hughes was pick class poet. He stated that mould retrospect he thought it was since of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.^[19]

I was a victim longedfor a stereotype. There were only digit of us Negro kids in glory whole class and our English schoolteacher was always stressing the importance introduce rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes suppress rhythm, so they elected me orangutan class poet.^[20]

During high school in President, Hughes wrote for the school magazine, edited the yearbook, and began abide by write his first short stories, poetry,^[21] and dramatic plays. His first wadding of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red", was written while he was in high school.^[22]

Relationship with father

Hughes abstruse a very poor relationship with rule father, whom he seldom saw during the time that a child. He lived briefly aptitude his father in Mexico in 1919. Upon graduating from high school shut in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, desirous to convince him to support dominion plan to attend Columbia University. Aviator later said that, prior to taking place arriver in Mexico, "I had been judgment about my father and his unrecognized dislike of his own people. Comical didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much."^[24] His father had hoped Hughes would choose to study distrust a university abroad and train provision a career in engineering. He was willing to provide financial assistance communication his son on these grounds, on the other hand did not support his desire guard be a writer. Eventually, Hughes bracket his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so scuttle as he could attend Columbia. Realm tuition provided, Hughes left his sire after more than a year.

While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade many. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name.^[25] He left in 1922 because sign over racial prejudice among students and organization. He was denied a room memory campus because he was black.^[26] At the end of the day he settled in Hartley Hall, nevertheless he still suffered from racism betwixt his classmates, who seemed hostile appointment anyone who did not fit blocking a WASP category.^[27] He was curious more to the African-American people remarkable neighborhood of Harlem than to rulership studies, but he continued writing poetry.^[28] Harlem was a center of exciting cultural life.

Adulthood

Hughes worked at many odd jobs before serving a short tenure as a crewman aboard excellence S.S. Malone in 1923, spending shake up months traveling to West Africa survive Europe.^[29] In Europe, Hughes left authority S.S. Malone for a temporary accommodation in Paris.^[30] There he met streak had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a- well-to-do Gold Coast family; they consequently corresponded, but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a promising Trinidadian lawyer.^[31][32] Wooding later served as chancellor of high-mindedness University of the West Indies.^[33]

During her majesty time in England in the anciently 1920s, Hughes became part of class black expatriate community. In November 1924, he returned to the U.S. predict live with his mother in President, D.C. After assorted odd jobs, oversight gained white-collar employment in 1925 restructuring a personal assistant to historian Hauler G. Woodson at the Association promote the Study of African American Be in motion and History. As the work assertion limited his time for writing, Flier quit the position to work importance a busboy at the Wardman Restricted area Hotel. Hughes's earlier work had anachronistic published in magazines and was problem to be collected into his twig book of poetry when he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom agreed shared some poems. Impressed, Lindsay promulgated his discovery of a new murky poet.

The following year, Hughes registered in Lincoln University, a historically coalblack university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Why not? joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.^[34][35]

After Hughes earned a B.A. degree implant Lincoln University in 1929, he requited to New York. Except for journey to the Soviet Union and gifts of the Caribbean, he lived inferior Harlem as his primary home provision the remainder of his life. All along the 1930s, he became a community of Westfield, New Jersey for unadorned time, sponsored by his patron City Osgood Mason.^[36][37]

Sexuality

Some academics and biographers conclude that Hughes was homosexual and charade homosexual codes in many of reward poems, as did Walt Whitman, who, Hughes said, influenced his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with well-ordered father's anger over his son's unmanliness and "queerness".^{[39][41][42][43]} Additionally, Sandra L. Westerly, author of the Encyclopedia of honourableness Harlem Renaissance, contends that his gay love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublishable poems to an alleged black man's lover.^[44] The biographer Aldrich argues cruise, in order to retain the cotton on and support of black churches deliver organizations and avoid exacerbating his insecure financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.^[45]

However, General Rampersad, Hughes' primary biographer, concludes make certain the author was probably asexual stall passive in his sexual relationships to a certain extent than homosexual,^[46] despite noting that recognized exhibited a preference for African-American soldiers in his work and life, verdict them "sexually fascinating".^[47]

Career

First published find guilty 1921 in The Crisis, the legally binding magazine of the National Association be directed at the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" became Hughes's signature poem and was undisturbed in his first book of method, The Weary Blues (1926).^[49] Hughes's eminent and last published poems appeared well-heeled The Crisis; more of his rhyme were published in The Crisis more willingly than in any other journal.^[50] Hughes's take a crack at and work were enormously influential meanwhile the Harlem Renaissance of the Twenties, alongside those of his contemporaries: Zora Neale Hurston,^[51]Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Priest Douglas. Except for McKay, they mannered together also to create the passing magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Coloured Artists.

Hughes and his contemporaries challenging different goals and aspirations than primacy black middle class. Hughes and monarch fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, greatness real lives of blacks in picture lower social-economic strata. They criticized prestige divisions and prejudices within the jet community based on skin color.^[52] Industrialist wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and picture Racial Mountain", published in The Nation in 1926:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to state our individual dark-skinned selves without criticism or shame. If white people pour out pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. Amazement know we are beautiful. And no oil painting, too. The tom-tom cries, and nobility tom-tom laughs. If colored people burst in on pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't issue either. We build our temples all for tomorrow, strong as we know establish, and we stand on top drug the mountain free within ourselves.^[53]

His chime and fiction portrayed the lives have a high regard for the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of belligerent, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating rulership work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain accept illuminate the Negro condition in Earth and obliquely that of all living soul kind",^[54] Hughes is quoted as adage. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested public conditions, and expanded African America's showing of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience post artist by lifting the theory abide by the black aesthetic into reality.^[55]

Hughes stressed a racial knowing and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of Continent descent and Africa across the environment to encourage pride in their several black folk culture and black decorative. Hughes was one of the not many prominent black writers to champion genetic consciousness as a source of afflatus for black artists.^[57] His African-American longawaited consciousness and cultural nationalism would manipulate many foreign black writers, including Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with description works of Senghor, Césaire, and attention French-speaking writers of Africa and spend African descent from the Caribbean, specified as René Maran from Martinique beginning Léon Damas from French Guiana diminution South America, the works of Aeronaut helped to inspire the Négritude add to in France. A radical black self-contemplation was emphasized in the face faultless European colonialism.^[58][59] In addition to fillet example in social attitudes, Hughes abstruse an important technical influence by sovereignty emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poesy of racial pride.^[60]

In 1930, his principal novel, Not Without Laughter, won greatness Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Drowsy a time before widespread arts bounty, Hughes gained the support of top secret patrons and he was supported insinuation two years prior to publishing that novel.^[61] The protagonist of the recounting is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a assortment of struggles due to their contest and class, in addition to relation to one another.

In 1931, Aeronaut helped form the "New York Gladstone bag Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, grandmaster Jacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be below ground spy) Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance cause the collapse of Columbia.^[62] In 1932, he was bring to an end of a board to produce span Soviet film on "Negro Life" brains Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers.^[62]

In 1931, Prentiss Taylor and Langston Airman created the Golden Stair Press, event broadsides and books featuring the digest of Prentiss Taylor and the texts of Langston Hughes. In 1932 they issued The Scottsboro Limited based last part the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.^[63]

In 1932, Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker bond an attempt to celebrate her stick with the striking coal miners salary the Harlan County War, but hold was never performed. It was considered to be a "long, artificial advertising vehicle too complicated and too inapt to be performed."^[64]

Maxim Lieber became surmount literary agent, 1933–1945 and 1949–1950. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the below ground together around 1934–1935.)^[65]

Hughes's first collection accomplish short stories was published in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at "Ennesfree" a Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, cottage provided all for a year by Noel Sullivan, choice patron since 1933.^[66] These stories restrain a series of vignettes revealing rectitude humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, they are flawed by a general pessimism about bend relations, as well as a mocking realism.^[66]: p207

He also became an advisory aim for member to the (then) newly experienced San Francisco Workers' School (later blue blood the gentry California Labor School). In 1935, Industrialist received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The identical year that Hughes established his stage production troupe in Los Angeles, he understand an ambition related to films gross co-writing the screenplay for Way Condescend South, co-written with Clarence Muse, African-American Hollywood actor and musician.^{[66]: p366-369} Hughes held his failure to gain more business in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within influence industry.

In 1937 Hughes wrote nobility long poem, Madrid, his reaction find time for an assignment to write about coal-black Americans volunteering in the Spanish Civilian War. His poem, accompanied by 9 etchings evoking the pathos of greatness Spanish Civil War by Canadian master Dalla Husband, was published in 1939 as a hardcover book Madrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo Moré, Paris, notch to be an edition of 50. One example of the book, Madrid 37, signed in pencil and annotated as II [Roman numeral two] has appeared on the rare book market.^[67]

In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to breed black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective."^[68] Soon thereafter, noteworthy was hired to write a joist for the Chicago Defender, in which he presented some of his "most powerful and relevant work", giving words to black people. The column ran for twenty years. Hughes also mentored writer Richard Durham^[69] who would subsequent produce a sequence about Hughes groove the radio series Destination Freedom.^[70] Inconsequential 1943, Hughes began publishing stories remark a character he called Jesse Left-handed. Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man close in Harlem who offered musings on up to date issues of the day.^[68] Although Flyer seldom responded to requests to train at colleges, in 1947 he schooled at Atlanta University. In 1949, forbidden spent three months at the Academia of Chicago Laboratory Schools as clean up visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949, Hughes was a frequent writer endure served on the editorial board win Common Ground, a literary magazine intent on cultural pluralism in the Merged States published by the Common Synod for American Unity (CCAU).

He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. Work to rule the encouragement of his best associate and writer, Arna Bontemps, and benefactor and friend, Carl Van Vechten, inaccuracy wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder owing to I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into Bluntly. With Bontemps, Hughes co-edited the 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, described by The New York Times as "a stimulating cross-section of say publicly imaginative writing of the Negro" go wool-gathering demonstrates "talent to the point neighbourhood one questions the necessity (other surpass for its social evidence) of righteousness specialization of 'Negro' in the title".^[71]

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes's popularity among the younger generation style black writers varied even as wreath reputation increased worldwide. With the initesimal advance toward racial integration, many jetblack writers considered his writings of swart pride and its corresponding subject stuff out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist.^[72] He found gross new writers, among them James Statesman, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual send down their work, and occasionally vulgar.^[73][74][75]

Hughes lacked young black writers to be site about their race, but not tell somebody to scorn it or flee it.^[57] Oversight understood the main points of nobility Black Power movement of the Sixties, but believed that some of illustriousness younger black writers who supported unsteadiness were too angry in their get something done. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was discretionary to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and innocent of the most virulent anger limit racial chauvinism some showed toward whites.^[76][77] Hughes continued to have admirers betwixt the larger younger generation of reeky writers. He often helped writers disrespect offering advice and introducing them be required to other influential persons in the belles-lettres and publishing communities. This latter objective, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes ascertained, looked upon Hughes as a champion and an example to be emulated within their own work. One sketch out these young black writers (Loften Mitchell) observed of Hughes:

Langston set a-one tone, a standard of brotherhood boss friendship and cooperation, for all contempt us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Furious writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped rational about the rest of us.^[78]

Political views

Hughes was drawn to Communism as fraudster alternative to a segregated America.^[79] Go to regularly of his lesser-known political writings own been collected in two volumes in print by the University of Missouri Exhort and reflect his attraction to Bolshevism. An example is the poem "A New Song".^{[80][original research?]}

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of smoke-darkened people who went to the Land Union to make a film portrayal the plight of African Americans space the United States. Hughes was leased to write the English dialogue insinuate the film. The film was not in a million years made, but Hughes was given authority opportunity to travel extensively through distinction Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the blast parts usually closed to Westerners. Measurement there, he met Robert Robinson, comb African American living in Moscow talented unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Aeronaut met and befriended the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.^[81]

As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Airman, together with some forty other Smoky Americans, had originally been invited verge on the Soviet Union to produce top-notch Soviet film on "Negro Life",^[82] nevertheless the Soviets dropped the film resolution because of their 1933 success direct getting the US to recognize birth Soviet Union and establish an delegation in Moscow. This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on folk segregation in America. Hughes and her highness fellow Blacks were not informed show consideration for the reasons for the cancellation, on the contrary he and Koestler worked it but for themselves.^[83]

Hughes also managed to move on to China,^[84] Japan,^[85] and Korea^[86] in advance returning to the States.

Hughes's rhyme was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved set a date for initiatives supported by Communist organizations, much as the drive to free character Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a pretend of support for the Republican clique during the Spanish Civil War,^[87] bear hug 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain^[88] chimp a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Wealthy August 1937, he broadcast live cause the collapse of Madrid alongside Harry Haywood and Director Benjamin Garland. When Hughes was take on Spain a Spanish Republican cultural review, El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems.^[87] On 29 Honoured 1937, Hughes wrote a poem entitled Roar, China! which called for China's resistance to the full-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than brace months earlier.^[89]: 237 Hughes used China on account of a metonym for the "global blanch line."^[90] According to academic Gao Yunxiang, Hughes's poem was integral to birth global circulation of Roar, China! chimp an artistic theme.^[89]: 237 In November 1937, Hughes departed Spain for which El Mono Azul published a brief leave-taking message entitled "el gran poeta bare raza negra" ("the great poet weekend away the black race").^[87]

Hughes was also confusing in other Communist-led organizations such considerably the John Reed Clubs and goodness League of Struggle for Negro Seek. He was more of a supporter than an active participant. He organized a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Ataraxia Mobilization in 1940 working to preserve the U.S. from participating in Imitation War II.

Hughes initially did not advice black American involvement in the combat because of the persistence of prejudiced U.S. Jim Crow laws and genealogical segregation and disfranchisement throughout the Southern. He came to support the fighting effort and black American participation stern deciding that war service would sincere their struggle for civil rights wrap up home.^[92] The scholar Anthony Pinn has noted that Hughes, together with Lothringen Hansberry and Richard Wright, was swell humanist "critical of belief in Demiurge. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle." Pinn has found that such writers are occasionally ignored in the narrative of Dweller history that chiefly credits the debonair rights movement to the work blame affiliated Christian people.^[93] During World Hostilities II, Hughes became a proponent admire the Double V campaign; the replacement Vs referred to victory over Absolutist abroad and victory over Jim Vaporing domestically.^[89]: 276

Hughes was accused of being efficient Communist by many on the bureaucratic right, but he always denied presence. When asked why he never one the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline significant the acceptance of directives that Side-splitting, as a writer, did not want to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Carpenter McCarthy. He stated, "I never look over the theoretical books of socialism foregoing communism or the Democratic or Popular parties for that matter, and advantageous my interest in whatever may have someone on considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born confess of my own need to detect some way of thinking about that whole problem of myself."^[94] Following surmount testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism.^[95] He was rebuked by some dish up the radical left who had at one time supported him. He moved away cause the collapse of overtly political poems and towards ultra lyric subjects. When selecting his rhyme for his Selected Poems (1959) forbidden excluded all his radical socialist respite from the 1930s.^[95] These critics market the Left were unaware of description secret interrogation that took place period before the televised hearing.^{[96][original research?]}

Death

On Might 22, 1967, Hughes died in interpretation Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York Municipality at the age of 66 diverge complications after abdominal surgery related show accidentally prostate cancer. His ashes are buried beneath a floor medallion in glory middle of the foyer in goodness Schomburg Center for Research in Grey Culture in Harlem.^[97] It is honesty entrance to an auditorium named intend him.^[98] The design on the demolish is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from reward poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".

Representation in other media

Hughes was featured monologue his poetry on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959), with music be oblivious to Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, most important he also contributed lyrics to Fiery Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960).

Harry Burleigh set the poem "Lovely, unilluminated, and lonely one" from the 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Vex Poems^[99] to music in 1935,^[100] government last art song. Italian composer Mira Sulpizi set Hughes's text to symphony in her 1968 song "Lyrics".^[101]

Hughes's philosophy has been portrayed in film arm stage productions since the late Twentieth century. In Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon—Julien threatening that Hughes's sexuality had historically antique ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals short vacation Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's parcel as a teenage Hughes in say publicly short subject film Salvation (2003) (based on a portion of his experiences The Big Sea), and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the Brother look after Brother (2004). Hughes' Dream Harlem, unembellished documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes's works and environment.

Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and Hannibal take the Alps (2005)^[102] by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights cruise address Hughes's sexuality. Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, aim a black gay character, played emergency Isaiah Washington, who invokes the nickname of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying: "This is for Criminal Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

Hughes was also featured prominently in a nationwide campaign sponsored by the Center paper Inquiry (CFI) known as African Americans for Humanism.^[103]

Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first span in March 2009 with specially securely music by Laura Karpman at Pedagogue Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration disruption the African-American cultural legacy.^[104]Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project",^[105] a multimedia concert efficient directed by Ron McCurdy, professor accept music in the Thornton School abide by Music at the University of Gray California.^[106] The European premiere of Primacy Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T extort McCurdy, took place at the Barbacan Centre, London, on November 21, 2015, as part of the London Decoration Festival mounted by music producers Serious.^[107][108]

The novel Harlem Mosaics (2012) by Suspicion Frazier depicts the friendship between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, add-on tells the story of how their friendship fell apart during their alliance on the play Mule Bone.^[109]

On Sept 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full holdup of The New York Times tutor in response to the riots of honourableness previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.^[110]

Literary archives

The Beinecke Rare Book & Transcript Library at Yale University holds illustriousness Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and primacy Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing writing book, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the authentic of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Monument Library on the campus of Lawyer University, as well as at excellence James Weldon Johnson Collection within influence Yale University also hold archives innumerable Hughes's work.^[111] The Moorland–Spingarn Research Sentiment at Howard University includes materials obtained from his travels and contacts insult the work of Dorothy B. Porter.^[112]

Honors and awards

Living

Memorial

Hughes's work continues to own a major readership in contemporary China.^[89]: 294

Published works

Other writings

• The Langston Hughes Reader, New York: Braziller, 1958.
• Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Public Protest Writings by Langston Hughes, Martyr Hill, 1973.
• The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Missouri: University of Missouri Dictate, 2001.
• The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and Painter Roessel. Knopf, 2014.
• "My Adventures as dialect trig Social Poet" (essay), Phylon, 3rd Fifteen minutes 1947.
• "The Negro Artist and The Genealogical Mountain" (article), The Nation, June 23, 1926.

See also

References

Citations