Langston Hughes
Born 1902 
Died 1967
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His parents divorced and so he was raised mostly by his grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band and her second husband also an abolitionist. During his high school years Langston Hughes began writing poetry. He had a sense of dedication which was imbedded in him by his grandmother. Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation and sadness fostered by parental neglect. He was driven early by his loneliness 'to books, and the wonderful world in books.’
After graduation he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University in New York. He then travelled to Africa and Europe. In November 1924. he moved to Harlem, New York, and had hisfirst book of poetry, The Weary Blues, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later.
Langston Hughes credited Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as the main influences on his writing. Hughes is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. Hughes not only wrote poetry but wrote novels, short stories and plays, which all had a strong influence of the world of jazz and as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred." Hughes life and work played an important part in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Hughes told the stories of his people without personalizing them, so the reader was allowed to visulize and draw his own conclusions.
Hughes remained loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926. His writings were firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist and cosmopolitan. Althought so of his offerings could sometimes appear to be bitter, he had a profound love of humanity, especially black Americans. He was perhaps the most original of African American poets simply by enormity of offerings and variety of his work. Langston Hughes died in 1967.
"Words are the paper and string to package experience, to wrap up from the inside out the poet's concentric waves of contact with the living world. Each poet makes of words his own highly individualized wrappings for the segments of life he wishes to present...Skilled or unskilled, wise or foolish, nobody can write a poem without revealing something of himself. Here are people. Here are poems. Here is revelation."