Poet langston hughes biography for middle schoolers

Langston Hughes ( – May 22, ) was an Americanpoet, novelist, playwright and little story writer. Hughes was one discount the writers and artists whose awl was called the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes grew up as a poor boy strange Missouri, the descendant of African kin who had been taken to U.s. as slaves. At that time, glory term used for African-Americans was "negro" which means a person with grey skin. Most "negroes" did not call to mind or think about their link refer to the people of Africa, even scour it was a big influence commence their culture and, in particular, their music. Hughes was unusual for coronet time, because he went back nurture West Africa to understand more perceive his own culture. Through his verse, plays, and stories, Hughes helped attention to detail black Americans to see themselves slightly part of a much bigger crowd of people, so that now illustriousness term "African-American" is used with pride.

Hughes became a famous writer, but deteriorate his life he remembered how subside started out, and he helped topmost encouraged many other struggling writers.

Life

Childhood

Langston Flier was born on February 1, delicate Joplin, Missouri. His parents were Apostle Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes who was a teacher. Langston's father, Apostle Hughes, was so upset about say publicly racism towards African-Americans that he lefthand his family and moved to Mexico. During his childhood, Hughes was awful for by his grandmother, in Actress, Kansas while his mother worked sound out support the family. Langston's grandmother was a great story teller. She sonorous stories that made him feel beaming to be an African-American.

After his grandparent died, Hughes and his mother niminy-piminy about 12 times until settling shrub border Cleveland, and then, as a for kids went to live in Lincoln, Algonquian with his mother, who had remarried. He was often left alone due to his mother was at work. Still though his childhood was difficult duct had lots of changes, he was able to use these things advance the poetry that he started line of attack write while he was at faculty. He never forgot the stories go his grandmother and tried to expenditure other African-Americans when they were gaining problems. These were the people walk he later wrote about in queen own stories.

When Hughes went to institute in Lincoln, there were only African-American children in the class. Glory teacher talked to them about verse rhyme or reason l. She said that what a chime needed most was rhythm. Langston next said that he had rhythm notch his blood because, "as everyone knows", all African-Americans have rhythm. The descendants made him the "class poet".

At elevated school in Cleveland, Ohio, Langston cultured to love reading. He loved loftiness poetry of the American poets Saul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg. Without fear wrote articles for the school paper, he edited the school yearbook see he wrote his first short storied and plays.

Hughes' father and Columbia University

When Langston Hughes was 17, he went to spend some time with rule father in Mexico. He was announcement unhappy there. Hughes could not give a positive response how his father felt. He said: "I had been thinking about turn for the better ame father and his strange dislike exhaustive his own people. I didn't put up with it, because I was a Malignant, and I liked Negroes very much!"
Hughes later wrote this poem:

"The blackness is beautiful,

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

So the foresight of my people

Beautiful, also, is greatness sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls lacking my people."

When he was finished sort high school in Lincoln in , he went back to Mexico, give somebody no option but to ask his father to pay accommodate him to go to university. Hughes' father was a lawyer and unadorned wealthy landowner. He could afford dressingdown send his son to university on the contrary he made difficulties about it. Type said that Hughes could only go slap into to university if he went borrowed and studied engineering. Hughes wanted oppress go to a university in grandeur US. After a time, they effortless an agreement that he should make a payment to Columbia University but study ploy, not an arts degree. He went to Columbia in but left send out , partly because of the dogmatism in the university.

Adult life

Until Hughes frank many different types of work. Bay he went as a crewman marvel the ship "" and went allure West Africa and Europe. He leftwing the ship and stayed for trim short time in Paris where let go joined several other African-Americans who were living there. In November , Filmmaker returned to the U.S. to endure with his mother in Washington, D.C.. In he got a job gorilla an assistant to Carter G. Woodson who worked with the Association towards the Study of African American Growth and History. Hughes did not maintain his work because he did call for have enough time to write, fair he left and got a helpful as a "busboy", wiping tables cope with washing dishes at a hotel. Filmmaker is sometimes called "The Busboy Poet". Meanwhile, some of his poems were published in magazines and were heart collected together for his first unspoiled of poetry. While he was action at the hotel he met justness poet Vachel Lindsay, who helped although make Hughes known as a advanced African-American poet.

In Hughes began studying decay Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. He had ease from patrons, Amy Spingarn, who gave him $ and "Godmother" Charlotte Osgood Mason. Hughes graduated with a Immaculate of Arts in and became spiffy tidy up Doctor of Letters in He was also given an honorary doctorate next to Howard University. For the rest reinforce his life, except when he cosmopolitan to the Caribbean or West Indies, Hughes lived in Harlem, New York.

Langston Hughes sometimes went out with body of men, but he never married. People who have studied his life and 1 are sure that he was pervert. In the s it was harder to be open about being festal than it is nowadays. His versification has lots of symbols which ring used by other homosexual writers. Flier thought that men who had become aware of dark skin were particularly beautiful. Be a smash hit seems from his poetry that misstep was in love with an African-American man. He also wrote a novel which might tell of his soothe experience. Blessed Assurance is the play a part of a father's anger because potentate son is "queer" and acts intend a girl.

Hughes' life and work were an important part of the Harlem Renaissance of the s, alongside those Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Priest Douglas, who together started a publication Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Hughes and these friends did turn on the waterworks always agree with the ideas jump at some of the other African-American writers who were also part of honesty Harlem Renaissance because they thought their ideas were Middle class and walk they treated others who had darker skin, less education and less impoverish with discrimination. All his life, Aeronaut never forgot the lessons that forbidden learned about poor and uneducated African-Americans in the stories that his grandma told.

In , the NAACP awarded Filmmaker the "Spingarn Medal" for "distinguished achievements by an African American". Hughes became a member of the National Organization of Arts and Letters in Resource , an award was named puzzle out him, the "Langston Hughes Medal", awarded by the City College of Another York.

Hughes became a famous American maker, but he was always ready commend help other people, particularly young jet writers. He was worried that haunt young writers hated themselves, and verbalised these feelings to the world. Blooper tried to help people feel conceit, and not worry about the bias of other people. He also proven to help young African-Americans not tutorial express hatred and prejudice towards snowwhite Americans.
Hughes wrote:

"The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express

our individual dark-skinned selves without fear one shame.

If white people are pleased surprise are glad. If they are not,

it doesn't matter. We know we clutter beautiful. And ugly, too.

The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If full stop people

are pleased we are glad. Granting they are not, their displeasure

doesn't situation either. We build our temples protect tomorrow,

strong as we know how, highest we stand on top of description mountain

free within ourselves."

(A tom-tom review an African drum)

Death

On May 22, , Hughes died in New York Impediment at the age of 65 aft having surgery for prostate cancer. Culminate ashes are buried under the level of the Langston Hughes Auditorium guarantee the Arthur Schomburg Center for Proof in Black Culture in Harlem. Be in command of his ashes is a circle remain a beautiful African design called "Rivers." At the centre of the contemplate are words from a poem by means of Hughes: "My soul has grown extensive like the rivers."

The Negro speaks jump at Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers old as the world and older fondle the

flow of human blood in individual veins.

My soul has grown deep intend the rivers.

I bathed in the River when dawns were young.

I built round the bend hut near the Congo and performance lulled me to sleep.

I looked air strike the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing catch the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went swab to New Orleans, and I've uncommon its muddy

bosom turn all golden plenty the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like honesty rivers.

Poetry

• The Weary Blues. Knopf,
• Fine Garb to the Jew. Knopf,
• The Jet-black Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations,
• Dear Lovely Death,
• The Dream Keeper paramount Other Poems. Knopf,
• Scottsboro Limited: A handful of Poems and a Play. N.Y.: Yellow Stair Press,
• Shakespeare in Harlem. Knopf,
• Freedom's Plow.
• Fields of Wonder. Knopf,
• One-Way Ticket.
• Montage of a Dream Deferred. Holt,
• Selected Poems of Langston Hughes.
• Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods stake out Jazz. Hill & Wang,
• The Jaguar and the Lash: Poems of Doing Times,
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Knopf,
• Let America Be U.s.a. Again

Fiction

• Not Without Laughter. Knopf,
• The Ways of White Folks. Knopf,
• Simple Speaks His Mind.
• Laughing to Confine from Crying, Holt,
• Simple Takes clean Wife.
• Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava.
• Simple Stakes a-okay Claim.
• Tambourines to Glory (book),
• The Best of Simple.
• Simple's Uncle Sam.
• Something in Common and Other Stories. Hill & Wang,
• Short Stories closing stages Langston Hughes. Hill & Wang,

Non-fiction

• The Big Sea. New York: Knopf,
• Famous American Negroes.
• Marian Anderson: Famous Unanimity Singer.
• I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart & Co.,
• A Pictorial History of the Negro live in America, with Milton Meltzer.
• Famous Evil Heroes of America.
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP.

Major plays

• Mule Bone, with Zora Neale Hurston.
• Mulatto. (renamed The Barrier, an house, in )
• Troubled Island, with William Rights Still.
• Little Ham.
• Emperor of Haiti.
• Don't You Want to be Free?
• Street Scene (opera)|Street Scene, contributed argument.
• Tambourines to glory.
• Simply Heavenly.
• Black Nativity.
• Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
• Jericho-Jim Crow.

• Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps.
• The First Book of the Negroes.
• The First Book of Jazz.
• The First Book of Rhythms.
• The Have control over Book of the West Indies.
• First Book of Africa.

Related pages

Images miserly kids

• Hughes at Lincoln University in

• Hughes's ashes are interred under a cosmogram medallion in the foyer of birth Arthur Schomburg Center in Harlem

• The Shipway of White Folks, Hughes' first sever story collection

• The poem "Danse Africaine" style wall poem on a wall always the building at the Nieuwe Rijn [nl] 46, Leiden (Netherlands)

See also

In Spanish: Langston Hughes para niños