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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. He only
lived there for a couple of months until he moved to Central Plains, Kansas.
Where he started to practically raise himself so in one form or another he
grew up mother and fatherless.
In 1915 he moved from Kansas to Lincoln, Illinois where he wrote
"Chicago Poems" and "To Youth" which were written in the time frame of
1916-1918. Then he went traveling the world and came back after the war
on September 4, 1921 and when he came back to New York he sat down his
bags in Harlem and looked at what he called "his people". By now "The
Negro Speaks of River" has been published and America loves it. He tells
his family that he was just sitting on a train on his way to St. Louis when he
started scribbling on a envelope he took out of his pocket. During this time
he also wrote a poem called "Simple John" and a poem called "Never Far
Away" was the nurturing thought of death, as in "Poem".
Langston Hughes wrote day in and day out and usually was never
really satisfied with his poems. Honestly, he really did not like dressing up
and doing public readings. At least that is what he told his friend Fauset.
In 1923-1924 Langston visited his motherland Africa, what he called
"Home of the Negro People", but after drinking a whole botle of white wine
his perspective changed. He saw it mostly as ridiculous customs that
should have been changed by now. After bieng there for eighteen days he
left Nigeria and moved south to Dakar and stayed there for one day,
enjoying the sites and picking up on his history.
From there he was on a ship called West Hesseltine on a five day trip
to Portugal greeting and meeting from the Kru Tribe. Which had loaded
unloaded his boat. There he wrote a poem called "To The Dark Mercedes of
El Palacio De Amor" to show the way african americans felt about white
people.
He moved back into America to Washington D.C. where he planned to...