Roaring Twenties

Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was the most representative single figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He was not its founder, its theorist, or its most decorated poet — those roles belonged to Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Countee Cullen, respectively — but he was the writer who most fully embodied the project of building a Black American modernism out of jazz, the blues, the Black vernacular, and the ordinary speech of Harlem. By the time of his death in 1967, Hughes had published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, history, children’s literature, and translation, and he was the most widely translated and most widely read American poet of the twentieth century.

For the wider context, see the parent Harlem Renaissance cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the literary movement, For the visual art and music,

Early Life: 1902-1921

Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, the son of James Nathaniel Hughes, a teacher and later an attorney, and Carrie Langston Hughes, a teacher. His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, was the first Black woman to attend Oberlin College, and the family had a long history of activism in the Black middle class. The parents separated shortly after his birth, and Hughes was raised chiefly by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, until her death in 1915.

After her death he moved with his mother and stepfather to Lincoln, Illinois, and then to Cleveland, where he attended Central High School. He began writing poetry in his last years of high school and was elected class poet. In 1920, visiting his father in Mexico, he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” on a train, and his father sent the poem to The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. It was published in June 1921, and the eighteen-year-old Hughes had his first publication in the most influential Black magazine in the country.

The 1920s: Columbia, Paris, and the Rise

Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in 1921, attended for a year, and dropped out in 1922. He worked as a merchant marine on transatlantic runs, then spent 1923-25 in Paris and Italy, supporting himself by playing piano in nightclubs and writing. He returned to the United States in 1925, settled in Washington, D.C., and entered the Opportunity magazine literary contest with a group of poems that won first prize in the poetry category and brought him to the attention of Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League.

The prize was the launch of a career. In 1926, Alfred A. Knopf published his first book, The Weary Blues, a collection of poems that fused jazz and blues rhythms with modernist technique. The book was widely reviewed, and Hughes became, almost overnight, the most discussed young Black poet in the country. In June 1926 he published the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation, an attack on the Black middle class’s reverence for white standards and a defense of the folk source. W.E.B. Du Bois attacked the book in The Crisis for romanticizing the lower-class Black urban life and for what he called “primitivism.” Hughes’s reply, in the same essay and in later statements, became one of the founding documents of the modernist wing of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1927 he published his second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew, and in 1930 his first and best novel, Not Without Laughter. The novel, about a Black boy growing up in small-town Kansas, was the first novel by a Black writer to receive the sustained backing of a major commercial publisher. By the end of the decade, Hughes was the most famous Black writer in the country and the most likely to be read by white as well as Black audiences.

The Style: Jazz, Blues, and the Vernacular

The Hughes style was built on three connected premises. The first was the jazz and blues inflection of the verse: the syncopated rhythm, the repeated phrase, the spoken inflection of the line. “The Weary Blues” of 1925, with its recording of a Black piano player in a Harlem bar, was the founding example. The second premise was the Black vernacular: Hughes used the colloquial speech of Harlem as the diction of his verse, in deliberate repudiation of the standard English demanded by the older Black literary generation. The third was simplicity of imagery: the poems are short, the images are concrete, and the line breaks are audible rather than visible.

The most famous of the later poems — “I, Too” (1925), a meditation on Black national identity published between The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes; “Let America Be America Again” (1935, written at the height of the Depression); and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” itself — are now standard texts in American schools. (For the wider musical context,

The Role in the Harlem Renaissance

Hughes was the writer who most clearly bridged the high modernist writers and the popular audience. He performed his poems with the jazz pianist Fats Waller and others, and he read in the Harlem nightclubs and the Progressive Party political venues. (For the venues, He was close to the visual artist Aaron Douglas, whose murals he admired and reviewed. (For Armstrong, Ellington, and the other musicians,

He was also at the center of the controversies. The dispute with Du Bois over The Weary Blues was the most public. Hughes argued that the Black artist should not be required to be a propagandist, and that the folk material — the blues, the jazz, the speech — was a legitimate source of high art. Du Bois argued, in a series of reviews in The Crisis and in his 1926 speech “Criteria of Negro Art,” that the Black artist had a duty to produce uplifting images of Black life. The argument has never been definitively resolved, and the politics of representation that came out of it is still being worked out.

The 1930s and After

In the 1930s, Hughes turned more to the theater and to the popular front of the New Deal coalition. He collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston on the play Mule Bone in 1930 (a collaboration that ended in a famous quarrel over authorship). He wrote the controversial play Mulatto (1934), which ran on Broadway for more than a year. He published the short-story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934), the autobiographical The Big Sea (1940), and the long sequence Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). In the 1940s and 1950s he wrote the popular “Simple” stories, told in the voice of a Harlem janitor named Jesse B. Semple.

In 1960 he published Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, a jazz-poetry suite intended for performance with a live band, and in 1967, shortly before his death of prostate cancer on May 22 at the age of 65, he was working on a wide range of projects. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, in eighteen volumes, was published by the University of Missouri Press between 2001 and 2014, and Hughes is now, with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, one of the three most-read American poets of any century.

Share