Langston Hughes Mother example essay topic

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was very small, and his father (who found American racism made his desires to be a lawyer impossible) left the family and emigrated to Mexico. Hughes' mother moved with her child to Lawrence, Kansas, so she and he could live with his grandmother, Mary Langston. Langston Hughes' mother moved to Topeka in 1907, leaving the five-year-old with his grandmother.

Langston came from a family of African-American activists. His mother's first husband had been killed at Harper's Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Langston (Langston Hughes' grandfather), had taken part in political activism on behalf of a slave. Charles Langston's brother, John Mercer Langston, had been a member of the United States House of Representatives (from Virginia) in the 1890's, as well as a diplomat, lawyer, and educator.

Though her past had been vivid and important, Mary Langston's presence was not enough to keep the young Langston Hughes form deep loneliness, and he found life in books. She died in 1915, and the boy, then 13 years old, moved to Illinois to join his mother and her new husband. He began the eighth grade in Illinois. Langston Hughes was successful in high school in Cleveland, Ohio; by 1918 he was publishing poetry and stories in the Central High Monthly Magazine and taking part in track events. He was elected class poet and editor of the annual his senior year. His first major publication was in 1921, when he was 19, with 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

' He went to Columbia University and met two important writers: W.E.B. Dubois, editor of the The Crisis, the journal that published 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'; and Countee Cullen, a young Harlem poet. In 1922 Hughes left Columbia University after having taken only a few classes. He moved to Harlem, part of upper Manhattan near the Columbia campus, in November 1924. Harlem was becoming famous for its rich environment for the flowering arts. In 1925 Hughes won first prize in a magazine contest with 'Weary Blues,' which gained him the attention of many of the writers we now think of as members of the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926. The work, though early, is signature in many ways, including its fusion of blues and jazz rhythms with people, especially the musicality of the ordinary daily speech of the African-American dialects. In 1926 he enrolled at Lincoln University (in a town called Lincoln University, Pennsylvania), where he graduated in 1929, the same year he finished his first novel. After attempting to come to terms with his father's materialism and leaving Harlem, feeling betrayed and misunderstood, Hughes went first to Haiti and then, back in the United States as the Great Depression began to settle in, the travelled through the American south, reading his poetry to people in churches and schools.

Following in the footsteps of his grandmother's family, he took his life in his hands by appearing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an all-white institution, and by getting involved in and publicizing the cases of young black men who had been accused of raping two white women. Carl Van Vechten dubbed him 'the Negro Poet Laureate. ' Hughes was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 'Unlike other notable black poets of the period-Claude McKay, Jean To omer and Countee Cullen-Hughes refused to differentiate between his personals experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to to ell the stories of his people without personalizing them, so the reader could step in and draw his own conclusions.

' Hughes wrote novels, stories, songs, speeches, and children's books. He is associated with jazz, which influenced some of his poems and to which he contributed lyrics, attitude, and themes. Irony and humor characterize Hughes' work. Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967, at the age of 67, in a hospital in New York, still an active and productive writer, still respected by millions..