The Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes

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The Harlem Renaissance was a period of great poetic, narrative, and artistic revolution and enlightenment in early twentieth century New York. One of the more influential and fantastic writers of that period was James Mercer Langston Hughes, commonly known just as Langston Hughes. Hughes was an extremely talented writer, for he published novels, poems, biographies, plays, television shows, operas, and proses. Despite his abundance of skills, poetry was arguably Hughes’s most precious forte. Hughes did not grow up with an ideal childhood, and he utilizes some of those hardships in his writings. Hughes had a colorful, diverse background, derived from his nomadic youth, that he graciously intertwined with his style. Hughes did not waste his …show more content…
From an early age, Langston was familiarized with hardship. His father left his mother when Hughes was a small child to go to escape to escape racial inequality and discrimination in the United States. Hoyt W. Fuller, a black American editor, author, and critic once commented that Hughes’s father’s escape from the racism is what fueled Langston’s ambition to embrace and fight the racism the country. Following his father’s departure, young Hughes went on to live with his grandmother while his mother moved around. At the age of thirteen, Hughes’s grandmother unfortunately passed away, so he went to live with his mother and her new husband. All in all, Langston lived in several different cities before he and his family finally settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was there in high school where Hughes was introduced to the writings of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, two of Langston’s most influential role models. After graduating high school, Hughes promptly went to Mexico to live with father for one year. Following Mexico, Hughes then studied for a year at Columbia University in New York …show more content…
During this time, he continued publishing novels, short stories, and poems, and served as a war correspondent for American newspapers for the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The 1940’s gave birth to Hughes’s most widely known character, Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple”, a black Everyman that Hughes utilized to tell stories of the everyday trials and tribulations of the average black man. In the latter years of the decade, Hughes interposed lyrics in a well-known opera of the time, Street Scene, in which the profit he earned enabled Hughes to purchase a house in Harlem. Furthermore, Hughes was also a professor of creative writing at Atlanta University. The success of Langston Hughes carried into the next two decades, for he wrote a play that inspired an opera, several novels, anthologies of works, translations, and the second installment of his autobiography. Unfortunately, Hughes died on May 22, 1967, due to complication caused by prostate cancer. Langston Hughes is considered one of the most influential writers of his time, and his works continue to be adapted and released

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