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Langston Hughes

African American Voices.Conneticutt:The Millbrook Press, 1995
Adventures in American Literature. Chicago: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980
Langston Hughes. We Too Sing America. G. Casey Cassidy.Online. Yale New Haven Teachers
Institute. 1998
Langston Hughes. The Influence of Musical Folk Traditions in the Poetry of Langston Hughes
and Nicolás Guill. Kathryn Gray.online. Yale New Haven Teachers Institute.1998

Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes.online. Biography Online.1997

Langston Hughes.Hughes Life and Career .Arnold Rampersad.online. Oxford University Press.
1997
The New Modern American and British Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939


Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues and jazz
into words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet, novelist, journalist, and
playwright.
Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was
brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband
(Hughes's grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social
justice.
As a lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while
in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University, but left after an
unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe,
a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis
(NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to
combine the traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly because of the depression Hughes became a socialist in
the 1930s....