James Langston Hughes was an American poet, playwright, and novelist.
Background
Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo. in 1902, the son of James Nathaniel Hughes, a stenographer for a mining company, and Carrie Mercer Langston. After his father abandoned the family for a business career in Mexico, Hughes lived in various places but mainly in Lawrence, Kans. , in the home of his grandmother Mary Langston, whose first husband had been a member of John Brown's "army" and died at Harpers Ferry. She instilled in her grandson a reverence for social and racial justice. But neither she nor his mother, who was frequently absent from Lawrence in pursuit of work, satisfied the boy's craving for affection, and he grew up a lonely child who sought relief mainly in books.
Between 1915 and 1916 he lived in Lincoln, Ill. , with his mother, who had remarried after divorcing his father.
Education
Hughes excelled at predominantly white schools in Topeka and Lawrence, where he faced prejudice from certain officials. At the Central School he wrote his first poem and was elected class poet in the eighth grade. In 1916 he moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, where he entered Central High School. In a student body dominated by the children of European immigrants, Hughes found a home. Handsome and personable, a leading runner and high-jumper, and the author of verse and short stories published in the school magazine, he was popular and respected. In 1919-1920, his senior year, he was elected class poet and editor of the yearbook; he also decided to be a writer. In September 1921, after a trying year in Mexico with his father, who though writing a waste of time, Hughes entered Columbia University. By this point, he had absorbed his early influences in poetry – notably the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Walt Whitman, and above all Carl Sandburg, whom Hughes referred to as "my guiding star. " Finding the university inhospitable (he was one of perhaps a dozen black students there), Hughes completed most of his freshman courses but then withdrew.
In 1926, Hughes resumed his schooling at predominantly black Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1929.
In 1943 Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt. D. In 1963 Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate. In 1964 Western Reserve University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt. D.
Career
In 1921-1922 he began to lay the foundations of his literary career by publishing free-verse poems such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Mother to Son" in W. E. B. Du Bois' Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The poems were inspired mainly, but not exclusively, by Afro-American culture.
For a while he worked in Manhattan as a delivery boy and then on a Staten Island vegetable farm. Seeking an ocean voyage as a messman, he found himself instead on a ship in a sleepy fleet of surplus vessels anchored up the Hudson River. He continued to publish verse, on which his experiences in New York, and especially Harlem, had left its mark. In "The Weary Blues, " for example, he showed the creative attentiveness to black music and the fearlessness in drawing inspiration from the most humble aspects of black culture that would distinguish his entire career. He learned more about that culture in the summer and fall of 1923, when he sailed on a freighter down the west coast of Africa. He also saw firsthand the effects of European colonialism, which he abhorred.
Early in 1924, after serving on a vessel bound for Europe, Hughes jumped ship and spent several months as a cook's helper in a Paris nightclub that featured black American performers. Here he experimented further with jazz and blues rhythms in his verse. The following year, spent mainly with his mother in Washington, D. C. , was a turning point in his life. In May 1925, "The Weary Blues" won first prize in poetry in a major literary contest run by Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League. He then met Carl Van Vechten, a white writer who encouraged Alfred A. Knopf to publish Hughes's first book of poems, The Weary Blues (1926). A second volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), though scathingly reviewed in the black press for its free use of the blues and dialect, confirmed his reputation as by far the most innovative of the younger black poets.
From 1927 to 1930 he enjoyed the patronage of Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, a wealthy, aged widow with a fervent faith in parapsychology. Under her guidance, Hughes wrote his touching first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), about a black boyhood in the Midwest, and visited Cuba, where he met and influenced the poet Nicol s Guillén. In 1930, however, the collapse of his relationship with Mrs. Mason left him in an emotional crisis that lasted several months. With money awarded by the Harmon Foundation as a prize for his novel, he spent several weeks in 1931 recuperating in Haiti. Still reeling from his disastrous encounter with philanthropy and feeling revulsion at imperialism in the Caribbean, Hughes returned to the United States committed to Marxism, to which he had been introduced in high school by the children of Russian immigrants.
Then, prompted by the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune, he set out in November 1931 to take his poetry to the people. Touring the South and the West until the following June, he read his poems in scores of black churches and schools. At the end of the tour, just after publishing Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play (1932) in support of the young black men accused of rape in Alabama, Hughes joined a band of twenty-two young blacks going to the Soviet Union to make a film on race relations in the United States. The film project soon collapsed, but Hughes traveled extensively in Soviet Central Asia, at one time in the company of Arthur Koestler, and spent the winter and spring of 1933 in Moscow.
Returning home via China and Japan, he accepted the invitation of a wealthy admirer to spend a year in Carmel, Calif. Here, in a community of writers that included Robinson Jeffers and Lincoln Steffens, he finished The Ways of White Folks (1934), a collection of tough-minded, even embittered stories of race; he had begun the book in the Soviet Union after he had read several tales by D. H. Lawrence. Driven from Carmel by right-wing pressure during a period of labor unrest in California, Hughes spent a half-year in Mexico following the death there of his father. He returned to the United States in June 1935.
His play Mulatto, about the fatal conflict between a white man and one of his mulatto sons, had been written at Jasper Deeter's Hedgerow Theater five years earlier and was about to appear on Broadway. Although the production was panned by the critics – Hughes blamed the producer for adding sensational details – the play ran for a year, becoming the longest-running work by a black on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun (a title taken from a Hughes poem) ran for 530 performances in 1959-1960. But little money reached Hughes, who lived in poverty with his mother mainly in Oberlin, Ohio. There he wrote for Russell and Rowena Jelliffe's Gilpin Players in Cleveland a number of plays, including the comedy Little Ham and the historical drama Emperor of Haiti (both 1936), that established him as a major Afro-American playwright.
In 1937, Hughes spent several months in Spain, especially in besieged Madrid, reporting on blacks in the civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American. He returned home in 1938 and founded the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, which staged his Don't You Want to Be Free? , a radical play based on his poems and the blues; in that year, he also published a pamphlet of political verse, A New Song, with an introduction by Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses. But Hughes's increasing need for money sent him to Hollywood, where he worked with the black actor and singer Clarence Muse on the film Way Down South (1939). Its stereotypical portrayal of black life led to severe criticism of Hughes but also enabled him to pay off several debts and to work on his first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). The Big Sea was overwhelmed by the appearance in the same year of Native Son by Richard Wright, who displaced Hughes as the most acclaimed of Afro-American writers.
Other setbacks followed. Work on musical revues in Chicago and Los Angeles ended in acrimony and failure, and right-wing religious forces picketed him over his most iconoclastic poem, "Goodbye Christ, " written eight years earlier when Hughes was in Russia and published without his approval. When he renounced the poem, elements of the Left denounced him. After a quiet year in Carmel Valley, Hughes returned east late in 1941. The following spring, working with a black theater group in Chicago, he staged The Sun Do Move, a play with poems and music that emphasize racial but also patriotic themes rather than leftist radicalism. The volume of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) also avoids Marxism.
Moving to Harlem, where he lived the rest of his life, he began a weekly column in the black Chicago Defender in 1942. The column's main feature soon became conversations with the comic character Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple. " While the war lasted, Hughes fought segregation, especially in the armed forces, but he also toiled, usually without pay, to write scripts and songs for various government agencies. Just after the war, Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice hired Hughes as lyricist on their Broadway opera Street Scene (1947), based on Rice's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. With his royalties, he bought a three-story town house in Harlem, where he lived to the end of his life with Emerson and Toy Harper, old friends who virtually adopted him as a son.
He devoted himself to a wide variety of projects, although he failed in the next few years to repeat the financial success of Street Scene. (Troubled Island, an opera with music by William Grant Still and based on his Haitian play, was staged in New York in 1949. ) He published volumes of verse: Fields of Wonder (1947), which avoids both race and politics; One-Way Ticket (1949); and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), a loving, jazz-based portrait of Harlem as a community both unfairly maligned and in genuine distress. With his longtime friend and correspondent Arna Bontemps, Hughes edited a number of anthologies, including The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949). In 1950 he brought out Simple Speaks His Mind, the first of five collections of his Simple columns. He wrote about a dozen books for children, almost all on black life and culture, and translated books of verse by Federico García Lorca, Nicol s Guillén (with Ben Carruthers), and Gabriela Mistral, as well as (with Mercer Cook) Masters of the Dew, a novel by Jacques Roumain of Haiti. With the German-born composer Jan Meyerowitz, he collaborated on several cantatas and operas, including The Barrier, based on the play Mulatto, which succeeded at the Columbia University Opera Workshop in 1950 but failed on Broadway.
In 1953, at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign and following damaging attacks on Hughes for his earlier radicalism, he was summoned before McCarthy's committee. Although he named no one as a Communist, he cooperated with McCarthy. His political philosophy had changed, but he also wished to avoid the price for defiance paid by black leftists such as Du Bois and Paul Robeson and to preserve his standing with his most important audience, the black community. Free now to pursue his career, he prospered as never before. In 1956 came his second volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander, which treats the period between 1931 and 1938 and features a long, evenhanded account of his year in the Soviet Union. In 1959, Knopf published Hughes's Selected Poems. In 1961 came Ask Your Mama, a jazz-influenced book-length poem that reflects his prophetic sense of coming racial turmoil in America even as integration was becoming law.
Hughes also returned to musical theater. In Simply Heavenly (1957), which centers on Simple, he enjoyed a measure of financial and critical success. But during this period he devoted most of his energy to drama and to pioneer fusions of black gospel music, which he saw as the last vestige of Afro-American folk music. His play Tambourines to Glory (1963), which depicts religious hypocrisy, was criticized as demeaning to blacks, but other dramas, such as Black Nativity (1961), on the Christmas theme, and Jericho – Jim Crow (1964), about the civil rights movement, played successfully in the United States and abroad. These plays are only a part of Hughes's enormous output, which includes the books of short stories Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952) and Something in Common (1963); A History of the NAACP (1962); pictorial volumes, such as The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), with the photographer Roy De Carava; and two anthologies of new writing by black Africans.
In spite of these efforts, the end of his life found him on the defensive against the most militant and divisive black-power and black-arts spokesmen. But no black American writer was more admired or beloved by the general Afro-American population or by black artists. He died in New York City.
Politics
Although he never joined the Communist party, his radicalism was at its height – as reflected in poems such as "Good Morning, Revolution, " published during his Soviet stay.
Views
Along with writers such as Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston and artists such as Aaron Douglas, Hughes was a major figure in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. His landmark essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), in which he affirmed the determination of young black writers to treat the subject of race without shame or fear, appeared in the Nation and became virtually the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance.
Quotations:
"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. "
"I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?"
"I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen, " Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed-- I, too, am America. "
"I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go. "
"Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe. "
Membership
He associated with the John Reed Club of New York and published pieces denouncing imperialism in New Masses.
In 1935 Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to travel to Spain and Russia. In 1941 Hughes was awarded a fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund.
In 1961, at the height of his prestige, Hughes was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. As always, he tried hard to bring the work of younger writers to public attention either by private encouragement or by editing anthologies such as New Negro Poets, USA (1964).
Personality
Hughes – who was slight of build at about five feet, four inches and had a somewhat singsong reading voice – often seemed at odds with his courageous poems, but he captivated audiences with an air of youthful innocence and a love of laughter.