Langston Hughes

Poet Background

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. His parents, James Nathaniel and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, separated when Hughes was young; by the time he was twelve, he had lived in several cities: Buffalo, Cleveland, Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, and Mexico City. Until 1914, however, Hughes lived mainly with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence. Hughes began writing poetry during his grammar school days in Lincoln, Illinois. While attending Cleveland's Central High School (1916-1920), Hughes wrote his first short story, “Mary Winosky,” and published poems in the school's literary publications. The first national publication of his work came in 1921, when The Crisis published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” The poem had been written while Hughes was taking a train on his way to see his father in Mexico City, a visit that the young man dreaded making. His hatred for his father, fueled by his father's contempt for poor people who could not make anything of themselves, actually led to Hughes's being hospitalized briefly in 1919.

Hughes's father did, however, send his son to Columbia University in 1921. Although Hughes did not stay at Columbia, his experiences in Harlem laid the groundwork for his later love affair with the city within a city. Equally important to Hughes's later work was the time he spent at sea and abroad during this period of his life. His exposure to American blues and jazz players in Paris nightclubs and his experiences in Europe, and especially in Africa, although brief, provided a rich source of material that he used over the next decades in his writing (Berry, P.87-91).

Hughes have always work against the racism in America, he did not use violence for revolution, but his poetry and writing he has influenced many citizens of America to give equal rights to African American through his poetry.

Compare and Contrast of the poems I,too -English B- Freedom

Hughes lived in an America that was torn apart by racism and segregation. Despite the so-called "opportunities" for blacks in the North of the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans lived in a differential relationship to the nation. Their experiences with the myth of the American dream did not escape Hughes's perspicacious gaze, and is thus a constant thread in his literary work.

Arguably, Hughes's most biting criticism of the limitations of the I,too. In this poem, Hughes describes the American values that have come to comprise the "dream"—freedom, liberty, democracy, and equality—all the while interjecting that the dream never actually existed for poor Americans, peoples of color, and "undesirable" immigrants. During enslavement, African Americans were excluded from participating in the American dream (also a theme in the 1931 poem "The Negro Mother") (Cooper, P.141-150). Forced into a cycle of poverty after emancipation, which included the sharecropping system and a rigid caste system that prevented anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from advancing; African Americans became the forgotten pioneers whose American dream amounted to nothing more than a nightmare. However, Langston Hughes's most anthologized ...