Langston Huges Essay Example For Students

Langston Huges Essay A gentle and mild-mannered soul who spent much of his life at the center of controversy, a gregarious spirit who was also zealously private, a writer of social conscience and solidarity who was fundamentally alone, Langston Hughes devoted his art to the true expression of the lives, hopes, fears, and angers of ordinary black people, without self-consciousness or sugar-coating. And this devotion has been repaid with an extraordinary and continuing popularity, as well as with a still-increasing critical acceptance of the literary artistry with which it was conveyed. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, to James Nathaniel Hughes, a lawyer and businessman, and Carrie Mercer (Langston) Hughes, a teacher. Their first child, a boy, had died in infancy. Their marriage was in trouble by the time of Langstons birth, and the couple separated shortly thereafter. James Hughes was, by his sons account, a cold man who hated blacks (and hated himself for being one), feeling that most of them deserved their ill fortune because of what he considered to be their ignorance and laziness. He went to Cuba and ultimately settled in Mexico. Langstons youthful visits to him there, although sometimes for extended periods, were strained and painful. James Hughes reluctantly paid for his son to attend Columbia University in 1921-22, but when he died in 1934, he left everything to three elderly women who had cared for him in his last illness, and Langston wasnt even mentioned in his will. Hughess mother went through protracted separations and reconciliations in her second marriage (she and her son from this marriage would live with him off and on in later years, often seriously depleting his limited funds, until her death in 1938). He was raised by alternately by her, by his maternal grandmother, and, after his grandmothers death, by family friends. By the time he was fourteen, he had lived in Joplin; Buffalo; Cleveland; Lawrence, Kansas; Mexico City; Topeka, Kansas; Colorado Springs; Kansas City; and Lincoln, Illinois. In 1915, he was class poet of his grammar-school graduating class in Lincoln. From 1916 to 1920, he attended Central High School in Cleveland, where he was a star athlete, wrote poetry and short stories (and published many of them in the Central High Monthly), and on his own read such modern poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg. His classmates were for the most part the children of European immigrants, who treated him largely without discrimination and introduced him to leftist political ideas. After graduation in 1920, he went to Mexico to teach English for a year. While on the train to Mexico, he wrote the poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which was published in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis, a leading black publication. After his academic year at Columbia, he lived for a year in Harlem, where he supported himself by an assortment of odd jobs. In June 1923, he embarked on a six-month voyage as a cabin boy on a merchant freighter bound for West Africa. After its return, he took a job on a ship sailing to Holland. In the middle of his second round trip to Holland, he quit the job in Rotterdam and caught a train to Paris. where he lived for the better part of a year, working as a nightclub doorman and a dishwasher. He also became emotionally close to Mary Coussey, the daughter of a Nigerian-born businessman. Throughout his life, for all his personal warmth and friendliness, Hughes was an intensely private person, and no aspect of his life was more closely guarded than his sexuality: different friends and acquaintances were equally certain that he was heterosexual, homosexual, and asexual. History of the Tibetan Genocide EssayIts titlewhich alluded to the necessity of bringing ones wardrobe, in hard times, to a pawnbroker (many of whom were Jewish, especially in black neighborhoods)was off-putting and somewhat offensive to many white readers, while the poems themselves, straightforward treatments of the harsh and gritty lives of ordinary black people, were offensive to many black critics and intellectuals, who wanted only the most positive and refined images of black life to be presented for the inspection of white audiences. While Hughes was not unsympathetic to the feelings of such critics, he rejected their basic assumptions as a willingness to allow the dominant white society to dictate the terms upon which black people, their values, and their lifestyles would be judged. During the highly politicized 1930s, Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union with a group of black filmmakers. Growing disillusioned with the filmmakers and their project, he toured Russia and parts of Asia on his own. Despite his interest in leftist political causes, he apparently never became a communist. After his return to America, he was involved in the founding of several theatrical companies in Harlem, Los Angeles, and Chicago. He also wrote and published some overtly political poetry, including defenses of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths in the deep South who had been, under sensational and extremely dubious circumstances, convicted of raping two young white women. His most important later volume of poetry is unquestionably Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which weaves lyrics drawn from the lives of the people of HarlemHughess home from 1947 to the end of his lifeinto a unified work that gives a remarkably full and vivid portrait of a community, its hopes and fears, its aspirations and frustrations. One of its most famous lyrics would later provide the title for Lorraine Hansberrys play A Raisin in the Sun. Hughes also became an extremely prolific writer of prose, publishing two autobiographies, two novels, several volumes of short stories, and a number of plays. By far his best-known and most beloved fictional creation was Jesse B. Semple, a Virginia native and Harlem resident known affectionately as Simple. His complicated love life, his anger and frustration at the indignities of segregation, his innate sorrow in the midst of a humorous and often sardonic approach to lifeall of these aspects of his nature were effectively conveyed through a series of brief sketches (ultimately collected in five volumes), in which he traded opinions with a somewhat stuffy and respectable acquaintance, who served as a foil for Simples much more unguarded and unconventional views. Both characters were drawn from aspects of Hughess own personality. The inspiration for Simple had originally come to Hughes through a conversation with a defense-plant worker in January 1943. The first Simple sketch, intended to serve as pro-war propaganda, appeared a month later in Hughess regular column in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper with a national readership. From the beginning, Simple was a great hit with Hughess readersalthough, as so often with his work, the sketches drew objections from more respectable typesand has remained one of the most enduring aspects of his achievement.