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Letters, Arts & Sciences · Literature

Langston Hughes

1901 – 1967

Poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist. A central voice of the Harlem Renaissance and creator of the Jesse B. Semple stories.

Langston Hughes, head-and-shoulders portrait photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1936
Carl Van Vechten, 1936. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Langston Hughes made the speech and music of ordinary Black Americans the substance of modern poetry. Over a career of more than four decades he published poetry, novels, plays, histories, and a long-running newspaper column, and he became the most widely read Black American poet of the twentieth century and the defining voice of the Harlem Renaissance.

At a Glance

Born
1 February 1901, Joplin, Missouri
Died
22 May 1967, New York City
Birth name
James Mercer Langston Hughes
Known for
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921); The Weary Blues (1926); Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951); the Jesse B. Semple stories
HBCU ties
Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) (Graduated, 1929)
Fields
Literature · Journalism
Era
Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, on 1 February 1901. For decades his birth year was given as 1902; in 2018 a researcher found a Kansas newspaper item from December 1901 reporting that “little Langston Hughes” had been ill, and most authorities now accept 1901. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, separated soon after his birth, and his father settled in Mexico.

He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been killed in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and her stories of resistance shaped the boy’s sense of history. For a time he also lived with his mother in Topeka, where, at age six, she had to fight school officials who tried to send him to a segregated school rather than the nearby Harrison Street School. After her death he lived with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, and then Cleveland, Ohio, where at Central High School he wrote for the school magazine and was chosen class poet.

Life and Work

In the summer of 1920, on a train crossing the Mississippi River to visit his father in Mexico, Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It appeared in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis in June 1921, the first of many poems Jessie Redmon Fauset and W. E. B. Du Bois published there. He enrolled at Columbia University that fall but left in 1922, citing the racism he encountered, and worked as a seaman on voyages to West Africa and Europe and as a kitchen worker in a Paris nightclub.

In 1925, while working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., he left poems beside the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsay, who praised them at a public reading, bringing Hughes press attention. Alfred A. Knopf published his first book, The Weary Blues, in 1926, the same year The Nation printed his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which defended Black artists who drew on blues, jazz, and working-class life. With Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and others he produced the single issue of the magazine Fire!! in 1926. Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) drew hostile reviews in parts of the Black press for its portraits of working people.

Hughes graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929. His first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), set in a Kansas town much like Lawrence, won the Harmon Foundation’s gold medal for literature. During the Depression his politics moved leftward: he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 with a group of Black Americans engaged to make a film about race, published the story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934), and reported on the Spanish Civil War in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro-American. His play Mulatto opened on Broadway in 1935, and his first autobiography, The Big Sea, appeared in 1940.

In 1942 Hughes began a weekly column for the Chicago Defender that ran for two decades. Its best-known creation was Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” a Harlem everyman whose barroom conversations skewered segregation; the columns were collected in Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) and later volumes. Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), a book-length sequence shaped by bebop, contains the poem later known as “Harlem,” which asks what happens to a dream deferred. In March 1953 he was compelled to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations about his radical writings of the 1930s.

Hughes also worked steadily in theater, history, and books for young readers. He wrote the lyrics for the Broadway opera Street Scene (1947) with the composer Kurt Weill and the playwright Elmer Rice, one of his most successful collaborations in the commercial theater. With Arna Bontemps he edited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (1949); with Milton Meltzer he wrote A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956). His second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, appeared in 1956, and his gospel song-play Black Nativity opened in New York in 1961. His last collection of poems, The Panther and the Lash, addressed the civil rights and Black Power struggles and appeared in 1967, the year of his death.

Legacy

The NAACP awarded Hughes its Spingarn Medal in 1960. He died in New York on 22 May 1967 of complications following surgery for prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath Rivers, a 1991 floor installation by Houston Conwill, Estella Conwill Majozo, and Joseph DePace in the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which quotes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” His papers are held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Hughes’s insistence that the blues, jazz, and vernacular speech were fit material for serious art reshaped American poetry, and he spent much of his career promoting other writers through anthologies, translations, and correspondence. Lincoln University named its library for him, and his poems remain among the most widely taught and recited in American schools.

For Educators

Hughes argued that the everyday speech, music, and struggles of ordinary Black Americans were worthy subjects for serious art, and that claim changed what American literature could be. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 1 February 1901 Born in Joplin, Missouri.
  2. June 1921 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is published in The Crisis.
  3. 1926 Publishes The Weary Blues and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”
  4. 1929 Graduates from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
  5. 1930 Publishes his first novel, Not Without Laughter.
  6. 1935 His play Mulatto opens on Broadway.
  7. 1942 Begins his weekly column in the Chicago Defender.
  8. 1951 Publishes Montage of a Dream Deferred.
  9. 1960 Receives the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal.
  10. 22 May 1967 Dies in New York City.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. National Park Service, “Langston Hughes.” Link
  2. Kansas Historical Society, “Langston Hughes,” Kansapedia. Link
  3. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940).
  4. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986–1988).
  5. New York Public Library, “Langston Hughes Lobby,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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