One of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance, writer Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri and grew up in the American Midwest before coming to New York to attend Columbia University in the early 1920s, a stay interrupted by racial prejudice at the school.
After taking 1923 to explore the world on a freighter, Hughes returned to Harlem in 1924. In 1926, his first book of poetry The Weary Blues appeared, immediately garnering him attention and praise, especially for what would become his signature piece, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers".
Hughes was one of the first poets to embrace the new movement of jazz poetry, wherein the rhythms and phrasings of jazz and blues were woven into his works.
After graduating from Philadelphia's Lincoln Unversity in 1929, Hughes traveled the country and the world again, reading his poetry to audiences, writing new works, and being inspired by what he saw on his journeys, from San Francisco to the Soviet Union to Spain. Throughout the period Harlem was his home base, and after World War II he returned here permanently, settling in the top floor of 20 East 127th Street (between Madison and Fifth Aves.).
Though he was a major voice of empowerment for black America, Hughes would never admit his homosexuality publicly, but did often hint at it subtly in his writing—or sometimes even strongly, as in 1951's Café: 3 A.M., which chronicled a police raid on a gay bar.
After Hughes died following a bout with prostate cancer in 1967, his ashes were interred in the foyer leading to the new Langston Hughes Auditorium at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Since his death, Hughes's sexuality has been posthumously owned and even embraced by the black community. In Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, Isaiah Washington (in an ironic role given his later Grey's Anatomy "fag" fracas) beats up a homophobe, shouting, "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."
For longer profiles of Langston Hughes, see his biographies on Harlem World and Poetry Foundation.
Seattle hosts an annual Langston Hughes African American Film Festival, which in 2011 runs from April 30 to May 8.
After taking 1923 to explore the world on a freighter, Hughes returned to Harlem in 1924. In 1926, his first book of poetry The Weary Blues appeared, immediately garnering him attention and praise, especially for what would become his signature piece, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers".
Hughes was one of the first poets to embrace the new movement of jazz poetry, wherein the rhythms and phrasings of jazz and blues were woven into his works.
After graduating from Philadelphia's Lincoln Unversity in 1929, Hughes traveled the country and the world again, reading his poetry to audiences, writing new works, and being inspired by what he saw on his journeys, from San Francisco to the Soviet Union to Spain. Throughout the period Harlem was his home base, and after World War II he returned here permanently, settling in the top floor of 20 East 127th Street (between Madison and Fifth Aves.).
Though he was a major voice of empowerment for black America, Hughes would never admit his homosexuality publicly, but did often hint at it subtly in his writing—or sometimes even strongly, as in 1951's Café: 3 A.M., which chronicled a police raid on a gay bar.
After Hughes died following a bout with prostate cancer in 1967, his ashes were interred in the foyer leading to the new Langston Hughes Auditorium at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Since his death, Hughes's sexuality has been posthumously owned and even embraced by the black community. In Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, Isaiah Washington (in an ironic role given his later Grey's Anatomy "fag" fracas) beats up a homophobe, shouting, "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."
For longer profiles of Langston Hughes, see his biographies on Harlem World and Poetry Foundation.
Seattle hosts an annual Langston Hughes African American Film Festival, which in 2011 runs from April 30 to May 8.
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