69 Facts About Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.

One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Langston Hughes moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.

Langston Hughes graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and soon began studies at Columbia University in New York City.

The other putative paternal ancestor whom Langston Hughes named was Silas Cushenberry, a slave trader of Clark County.

Langston Hughes wrote that Cushenberry was a Jewish slave trader, but a study of the Cushenberry family genealogy in the nineteenth century has found no Jewish affiliation.

Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns.

Langston Hughes's father left the family soon after the boy was born and later divorced Carrie.

The senior Langston Hughes traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.

Langston Hughes was raised mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston Hughes.

Later, Langston Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois.

Langston Hughes stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.

Langston Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father, whom he seldom saw when a child.

Langston Hughes lived briefly with his father in Mexico in 1919.

Langston Hughes's tuition provided, Hughes left his father after more than a year.

Langston Hughes published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name.

Langston Hughes left in 1922 because of racial prejudice among students and teachers.

Langston Hughes was denied a room on campus because he was black.

Langston Hughes was attracted more to the African-American people and neighborhood of Harlem than to his studies, but he continued writing poetry.

Some academics and biographers believe that Langston Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as did Walt Whitman, who, Langston Hughes said, influenced his poetry.

Langston Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness".

Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Langston Hughes, determined that Langston Hughes exhibited a preference for African-American men in his work and life.

Langston Hughes did show a respect and love for his fellow black man.

On May 22,1967, Langston Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 66 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer.

Langston Hughes's ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Langston Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", published in The Nation in 1926:.

Langston Hughes confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America's image of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

Langston Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate.

Langston Hughes's thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic.

Langston Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.

At a time before widespread arts grants, Langston Hughes gained the support of private patrons and he was supported for two years prior to publishing this novel.

In 1931, Langston Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, artist Jacob Burck, and writer Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance from Columbia.

In 1931 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.

Langston Hughes finished the book at a Carmel, California, cottage provided for a year by Noel Sullivan, another patron.

Langston Hughes became an advisory board member to the newly formed San Francisco Workers' School.

Langston Hughes believed his failure to gain more work in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within the industry.

In 1937 Langston Hughes wrote the long poem, Madrid, his reaction to an assignment to write about black Americans volunteering in the Spanish civil war.

Langston Hughes's poem, accompanied by 9 etchings evoking the pathos of the Spanish Civil War by Canadian artist Dalla Husband, was published in 1939 as a hardcover book Madrid 1937, printed by Gonzalo More, Paris, intended to be an edition of 50.

Langston Hughes mentored writer Richard Durham who would later produce a sequence about Langston Hughes in the radio series Destination Freedom.

In 1943, Hughes began publishing stories about a character he called Jesse B Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day.

Between 1942 and 1949, Langston Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board of Common Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States published by the Common Council for American Unity.

Langston Hughes wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children.

Langston Hughes found some new writers, among them James Baldwin, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.

Langston Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it.

Langston Hughes understood the main points of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work.

Langston Hughes continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers.

Langston Hughes often helped writers by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities.

Langston Hughes set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow.

Langston Hughes was drawn to Communism as an alternative to a segregated America.

In 1932, Langston Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States.

The film was never made, but Langston Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners.

In Turkmenistan, Langston Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.

Langston Hughes managed to travel to China, Japan, and Korea before returning to the States.

Langston Hughes's poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys.

Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Langston Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers.

When Langston Hughes was in Spain a Spanish Republican cultural magazine, El Mono Azul, featured Spanish translations of his poems.

Langston Hughes was involved in other Communist-led organizations such as the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.

Langston Hughes was more of a sympathizer than an active participant.

Langston Hughes signed a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the US from participating in World War II.

Langston Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory US Jim Crow laws and racial segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South.

Langston Hughes came to support the war effort and black American participation after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home.

Langston Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it.

Langston Hughes was rebuked by some on the Radical Left who had previously supported him.

Langston Hughes moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects.

Langston Hughes was featured reciting his poetry on the album Weary Blues, with music by Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, and he contributed lyrics to Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika.

Langston Hughes' life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century.

Langston Hughes was featured prominently in a national campaign sponsored by the Center for Inquiry known as African Americans for Humanism.

Langston Hughes' Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, 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.

The European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T and McCurdy, took place at the Barbican Centre, London, on November 21,2015, as part of the London Jazz Festival mounted by music producers Serious.