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James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. An early innovator of jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
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culture · American writer and social activist (1901–1967) · poet · novelist · playwright · essayist · writer · journalist · children's writer · biographer · opinion journalist · theatre manager · also Langston Hughes, James Mercer Langston Hughes, James Langston Hughes, Hughes
Born 1 February 1902 · Died 22 May 1967 · Q188093
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has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.
87%The New York TimesSource
“My chief literary influences have been Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”
“has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.”
“I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn”
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The Guardian: Uefa has formed a rare but fragile united front against Fifa in battle for football’s future | Nick Ames and Matt Hughes
Forbes: Langston Hughes Saw Democracy As Something We Owe One Another
MadameNoire: Langston Hughes: 7 Iconic Quotes Showcasing His Poetic Genius
Miami Herald: Langston Hughes wrote a poem about Black voters in Miami. Why don’t more of us know? | Opinion
insider.si.edu: Langston Hughes : critical perspectives past and present / edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah
The Guardian: Where to start with: Langston Hughes
JSTOR Daily: Langston Hughes—Our Poet Supreme
The Village Voice: Langston Hughes: A Genius Child Comes of Age
JSTOR Daily: The Langston Hughes Archive: Perspectives on Future Research
The Guardian: The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes – review
The Guardian: Langston Hughes 'born a year before accepted date', researcher finds
Yahoo: Langston Hughes Documentary, ‘I, too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled’ Explores His Life & Work
Hyperallergic: Langston Hughes’s Collection of Rent Party Cards from Harlem
His poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page of The New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina
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The Guardian: Ice-T and Ron McCurdy review – a raging, inspired revival that would make Langston Hughes proud
As part of the London Jazz Festival mounted by music producers Serious
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Jazz: Langston Hughes | Jazz – Biography, Albums & More | All About Jazz
And was registered as a historic place in 1982
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At the age of 66, Hughes died at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City from complications following abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer
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Died 1967-05-22.
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Was intended to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virulent anger and racial chauvinism some showed toward whites
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Won Spingarn Medal (1960).
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Was performed for the first time in March 2009 with specially composed music by Laura Karpman at Carnegie Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy
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Awarded Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (1954).
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Was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy
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“it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept.”
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Spent three months at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer
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Alongside Anna Bontempts he edited the anthology of "The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949", which was hailed as the "most comprehensive and valuable collection of its kind"
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Hughes began publishing stories about a character he called Jesse B
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Which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective
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As a hardcover book Madrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo Moré, Paris, intended to be an edition of 50
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Hughes wrote a poem titled Roar, China
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Hughes wrote the long poem, Madrid, his reaction to an assignment to write about black Americans volunteering in the Spanish Civil War
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Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers
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“s resistance to the full-scale invasion which Japan had launched less than two months earlier. Hughes used China as a metonym for the”
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“Let America Be America Again”
Hughes received a Guggenheim Fellowship
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Issued The Scottsboro Limited based on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys
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Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker in an attempt to celebrate her work with the striking coal miners of the Harlan County War, but it was never performed
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Langston Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a group of African Americans invited to participate in a proposed film depicting the conditions of Black life in the United States
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Was part of a board to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life" with Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers
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Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, artist Jacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be underground spy) Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance from Columbia
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Prentiss Taylor and Langston Hughes created the Golden Stair Press, issuing broadsides and books featuring the artwork of Prentiss Taylor and the texts of Langston Hughes
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His first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature
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And sent to the university under the name of "Alabama Earth"
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Zora Neale Hurston on a Passenger Terminal in Mobile, Alabama
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“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
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As a personal assistant to historian Carter G
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Spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe
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Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average
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In The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" became Hughes's signature poem and was collected in his first book of poetry, T
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Born 1902-02-01.
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In Joplin, Missouri (though Hughes himself claims in his autobiography to have been born in 1902)
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The widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family
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Lewis Leary joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, where he was fatally wounded
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