Langston Hughes Research Paper

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin Missouri in the year 1902. Langston Hughes, mother and father soon divorced when he was still a young child. His father Mr. Hughes moved to Mexico because he thought that a man of color had more opportunity living in Mexico than in the United States. His Mother moved them around very frequently, not to long after his father left Langston Hughes went to go live with his maternal grandmother Mary Sampson Patterson. During a time in American History were African Americans had no rights or freedom of speech or even a right to vote, and growing up in many different cities and living with many relatives, Langston Hughes experienced poverty and hardships. Hughes, used poetry to speak to the people. Langston Hughes
Mary Mcleaod Bethune also encouraged him. She encouraged him to go on a poetry reading tour of the south in 1931 and in 1932. On the tour he met: E.C.L. Adams, Margaret Walker, Nicolas Guillen, Jacques Roumain, Arthur Koestler and Boris Pasternak. All of those people “stimulated a creative outpouring of poetry, short stories, essays and further propelled Hughes into the nation and international consciousness as a writer worth serious critical consideration” (MacNicholas 318). His verse was “influenced thematically by the social realism of Lindsay, Masters and Sandburg, and technically by the rhythms of jazz”(Hunter 147). Langston Hughes was inspired by the rhythms of jazz music and was one of the first poets to incorporate his poetry to jazz music. Jazz music wasn’t the only influence that Langston Hughes had, he was influenced by the Civil rights, and how African American people in that time had to live their lives, the struggles of segregation and the Harlem Renaissance. He mostly writes about what is found in representative public expressions of Negroes… discrimination in education, employment and
“ Hughes shapes its substance to the cadences, accents, and ductile phrases familiar to most Negroes; and he weaves incident, personality, and racial history into recurrent patterns”(Hunter 176). One of the reasons why Langston Hughes had such great success was because he was equally sensitive to the dignity that African Americans endured as well as their endured or resisted oppression. His works aren’t always serious and raw, in some of his works he incorporates another talent that he has. “ With humor, one of his rare gifts, Hughes injects comfortable chuckles into much of his poetry and prose”(Emanuel