Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist whose 40-year career produced one of the most-iconic African-American literary bodies of work in 20th-century American letters — and one of the foundational figures of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. He was born James Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, into a African-American family with abolitionist and civil-rights heritage. His paternal grandmother Mary Patterson Langston had been the first wife of abolitionist Sherman Lewis Leary (who died at the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid alongside John Brown).

His literary career began in 1921 — at age 19, while attending Columbia University — when his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in The Crisis magazine (the NAACP magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois). The poem became an foundational document of African-American 20th-century poetry. His 1923–1924 voyages as a merchant-marine seaman to Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean shaped his subsequent body of work.

His 1926 first book of poetry The Weary Blues — published while he was a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania — established him as one of the young figures of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance — the 1918–1937 cultural-artistic-literary flourishing of African-American culture centered in upper-Manhattan Harlem — was shaped by Hughes alongside Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Duke Ellington, and many other Black artists.

His subsequent body of work spanned 16 books of poetry, two novels, three short-story collections, eleven plays, and over 60 columns for the Chicago Defender Newspaper (the 1942–1962 "Simple Stories" column featuring the Harlem character Jesse B. Semple, known as "Simple"). His 1951 poem "Harlem" — featuring the line "What happens to a dream deferred?" — has been continuously cited as one of the 20th-century American poems. He died on May 22, 1967, at age 65, in New York City.

His name Langston is from the Old English place-name meaning "long stone" or "long-town." Langston has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.