Langston Hughes James Langston Hughes example essay topic

Langston Hughes James Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He was named after his father, but it was later shortened to just Langston Hughes. He was the only child of James and Carrie Hughes. His family was never happy so he was a lonely youth.

The reasons for their unhappiness had as much to do with the color of their skin and the society into which they had been born as they did with their opposite personalities. They were victims of white attitudes and discriminatory laws. They moved to Oklahoma in the late 1890's. Although the institution of slavery was officially abolished racial discrimination and segregation persisted. Langston Hughes parents then separated. Since his mother moved from city to city in search of work he lived in Lawrence, Kansas, with his grandmother named Mary Hughes.

She fiercely opposed to racial discrimination. While growing up, Langston also stayed with friends of the family, James and Mary Reed. Living with his grandmother and the Reeds in all-white neighborhoods, he felt even more isolated. When Langston was ready to start school in 1908, his mother was told that because her son was black, he could not attend a nearby, mostly white school in Topeka, Kansas. Carrie, his mother, fought with the school over their decision. She won her fight and Langston was finally admitted to the school.

He deal ed with his loneliness by writing poetry. After Langston's grandmother died in 1915, he went to live with his mother, her second husband, Homer Clark, and Clark's two-year-old son, Gwyn. They went from Lawrence, Kansas to Kansas City, Missouri to Lincoln, Illinois. They moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1916. Clark moved to Chicago, Illinois. Langston's mother followed him and Langston was left alone in Cleveland.

He devoted himself to his class work and other interests. He was on the editorial staff, on the student council, one the track team, an officer in the drill corps, and acted in school plays. When Langston Hughes attended Central High, the student body was very ethnically diverse. Langston's Jewish friends were the ones who first opened his eyes to the ideals of socialism.

Socialism is the doctrine that all property in a society is public property. Claude McKay, a black writer whose articles and poems appeared in the Liberator, became a favorite of Langston's. Langston started to use Negro (African-American) dialects as well as the words and rhythms of the music he heard while attending church and Sunday school with Mrs. Reed. He also used street talk and the blues. Hughes poetry began to reflect images of black experiences; also captured in Rom are Bearden's After Church. He wrote his famous poem When Sue Wears Red, to one of his high school sweet hearts.

A lot of his early poems focused on how it felt to be black. When Hughes moved to Harlem in 1921, the district was in the process of becoming heavily populated by blacks. Hughes arrived in New York City in September 4, 1921, he was only nineteen years old. His year of study at Columbia University in New York was not an especially happy one for him, as life at the Ivy League school offered its share of troubling racial encounters. In May of 1922, Hughes found out that his father had a stroke and was in critically ill. Counter Cullen went from being Hughes' close friend to his chief poetic rival as the two poets differed in their opinions of what it is that their poetry should try to accomplish.

Hughes poetry was steadily being published throughout 1922. One night in March 1923, in a Harlem blues club, he began writing The Weary Blues. The poem expressed his desire to capture black music and speech in his poetry. Hughes left New York on June 13, 1923, heading to the west coast of Africa.

During Hughes visit to Africa in 1923, he was as impressed with the openness of the people there he was with the wild style of dress. In a kind of depressed frame of mind, he wrote, I, Too, Sing America, one of his most powerful and best-known poems. After taking number of odd jobs over the years to support himself, Hughes welcomed the opportunity to become a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Some of Hughes poems were published in 1927 named Fine Clothes to the Jew. The poems in Fine Clothes to the Jew offered as earthy and unsentimental a description of black life as had then been published.

Charlotte Mason became Hughes chief patron in the spring of 1927. Their relationship lasted for three-and-a-half years. Hughes helped work on a play called Mule Bone, based on the myths and folk styles of rural southern blacks. After winning the Harmon prize for achievement in black literature, Hughes was able to afford a trip to Cuba and Haiti in April 1931. He established a small publishing company called Golden Stair Press. The poem entitled Christ in Alabama contains provocative language and a harsh commentary on southern justice and race relations.

The publication of the poem, which concludes with the lines "Nigger Christ / On the cross of the South", touched off a furor not only in Chapel Hill but also throughout the South. Hughes's tour of Asia in 1932 allowed him to compare the treatment of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union with the treatment of blacks in the American South. Hughes published The Ways of White Folks, in 1934. Several weeks after he started writing under his pseudonym, David Boatman, he found out that his father had died in Mexico. Don't You Want to Be Free? captured the imagination of its audience and played to capacity crowds until the end of the Suitcase Theater's first season.

Hughes spent the early part of the 1940's working on his autobiography, The Big Sea, which tells in brilliantly clear language the story of his life up to the year 1931. He explored the expressing validity of black vernacular in urban and rural black lifestyles. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1930. He wrote playwrights and created major Broadway successes as Scottsboro Limited (1932) and Mulatto (1935). In first collections of short stories, The Ways Of White Folks, published in 1934. He was recognized as Simple a humorist through the creation of a character named Jessie B. Semple who, Simple States A Claim (1957), makes commentary on social issues confronting the black community in a vernacular style which strikes a common chord in its simplicity.

In 1957, Semple was brought to Broadway in the musical Simply Heavenly. In May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes in died in New York City. The reason why I picked Langston Hughes as my famous African American was because his poems are my favorites. The other reason is that he was always trying to improve the life of African Americans.

So, as in conclusion, I would like to say Langston Hughes is an American hero..