The master poet of the Harlem Renaissance and one of America’s most translated authors, James Mercer Langston Hughes captured the blues stanza and the dialect music of mainstream black America. The rare professional poet and playwright who earned a living from publication, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, he became America’s first internationally known black writer. He attempted most literary venues, including short and long fiction, songs, history, humor, journalism, travelogue, juvenile literature, stage comedy, and screenplay. Hughes was an inveterate collector of bits of Afro-Americana gleaned from chance encounters, sonorous sermons, jingles and advertisements, and snatches of jazz tunes.
Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, on a literary diet of the Bible and Crisis, the NAACP magazine. When his parents divorced in 1913 and his mother married a white man, he lived in her ramshackle apartment in Lincoln, Illinois. He served as class poet of his elementary school.
Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland. After graduation, he lived in Mexico for fifteen months with his father, from whom he wheedled tuition to Columbia University. On the dismal train ride to Mexico, he displayed his literary promise with “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which he wrote while crossing the Mississippi River near St. Louis. On his return north in 1921, he published it in Crisis.
Hughes left college after two semesters and worked as a truck farm laborer, waiter, and valet before accepting a berth as seaman aboard the S. S. Malone on a transatlantic haul to west Africa. This was his first trip abroad, and he anchored his optimism on the support of Joel Spingarn and Jessie Fauset and letters from Countée Cullen and Alain Locke. He became the only member of the Harlem Renaissance artists to sample the atmosphere of Nigeria and Angola. He reveled in the exotic fragrances and sights of the Canary Islands, Dakar, Timbuktu, and Lagos, source of his anti-European manifesto, “Liars.”
In 1924, Hughes cooked and washed dishes at Le Grand Duc, a chi-chi cabaret in the fashionable Montmartre section of Paris. After capturing dawn hours on the Rue Pigalle in “The Breath of a Rose,” he welcomed the tutelage of Locke, who escorted him to the city’s landmarks and the Piazza San Marco of Venice. Hughes returned to New York and published eleven poems in Locke’s anthology, The New Negro (1925).
While busing dishes at the Wardman Park Hotel, Hughes left a few sheets of verse for the perusal of a diner, poet Vachal Lindsay. The next morning, the newspapers reported that Lindsay had discovered a prodigy among the kitchen help. By age 23, Hughes netted a poetry prize from Opportunity magazine for “The Weary Blues,” a masterwork about a pianist he had heard at the Cotton Club. Hughes gained the ear of critic Carl van Vechten, who passed him on to publisher Alfred A. Knopf and encouraged the editors of Vanity Fair and American Mercury to publish a glittering new talent. On a Southern tour, he won the admiration of playwright Eugene O’Neill and poet James Weldon Johnson but met with smug, eloquent racism at Vanderbilt University, where Allen Tate declined to meet the celebrated Harlemite.
In 1926, Hughes completed the groundbreaking Afro-American manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” He asserted that blacks must free themselves from a pervasive self-loathing for being black and from the styles and topics indigenous to white literature. To express his individuality, a first stand-alone title, The Weary Blues (1926), assimilated black music and verse. He completed a B.A. in literature at Lincoln University and worked at the Association for the Study of Negro Life in Washington, D.C. While living in Westfield, Pennsylvania, at the beginning of the Depression, he published a novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), a depiction of small-town life in the Midwest that earned enough royalties to free him from patrons.
In the spring of 1931, Hughes collaborated with folklorist Zora Neale Hurston on Mule Bone, a three-act folk comedy. After a quarrel over how to pay a typist, the duo ended their friendship. The play remained unperformed until its debut in February 1991 at New York’s Lincoln Center.
As the Harlem Renaissance slowly fizzled, Hughes, influenced by the verse of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, absorbed the essence of Harlem street life and characterized the Negro’s plight in America in Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Dear Lovely Death (1931). In addition, he wrote The Dream Keeper (1932) and Popo and Fifina (1932) for young readers and translated socially conscious verse by black poets from Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico. He wrote for New Masses, a Communist journal, and, in 1932, toured Russia, China, and Japan, a journey that brought FBI scrutiny during the paranoid McCarthy era. He collaborated with musician James Price Johnson on a stage work, De Organizer (1932), and crafted Scottsboro Limited (1932) for the stage, a propaganda piece that hammered out the message that the South still denied justice to blacks. In 1935, he composed “To Negro Writers,” an essay demanding a world free of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and handouts.
In 1939, Hughes established Los Angeles’s New Negro Theater, which produced his plays Trouble Island, Angela Herndon Jones, and Don’t You Want to Be Free? Resituated at Chicago’s Grand Hotel, he wrote an autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), that mourned the decline of interest in black culture, as did the essay “When the Negro Was in Vogue.” In addition to adult literature, Hughes assembled four volumes of children’s stories about the adventures of a doughty, Harlem-based scamp, Jesse B. Semple, called “Simple.” The adventures of the optimistic, street-smart youngster ran in the Chicago Defender and New York Post and dominates Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1952), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), Simple’s Uncle Sam (1965), and a Broadway musical, Simply Heavenly (1957). Favorites of poetry anthologizers are “Dream Variations,” “Harlem,” and “Theme for English B” from his Harlem cycle, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).
Into the 1960s, Hughes continued to make headlines. He published a poetry anthology, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz (1961), and his play Tambourines to Glory (1965) ran on Broadway. He died of cancer on May 22, 1967; a posthumous title, The Panther and the Lash (1967), rounded out his twelve published volumes.
