Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance
During the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes gained fame and respect for their ability to express the Black American experiences in their works. Langston Hughes was one of the most original and versatile of the twentieth – century black writers. Influenced by Laurence Dunbar, Carl Dandburg, and his grandmother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes began writing creatively while still a boy.
Born in Joplin Missouri, Langston Hughes lived with both his parents until they separated and at the age of seven, he had to go and live with his maternal grandmother. Although she told him wonderful stories about Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth and took him to hear Booker T. Washington, Langston did not get all the attention he needed. Furthermore, Hughes felt hurt by both his parents and was unable to understand why he was not allowed to live with either of them. These feelings of rejection caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure of himself. Because his childhood was a lonely time, he fought the loneliness by reading.
“Books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas” (Hughes 16).
Langston Hughes began writing in high school, and even at this early age was developing the voice that made him famous. Hughes writing talent was recognized by highschool teacher and classmates, and Hughes had his first pieces of verse published in the Central High Monthly, a sophisticated school magazine. An English teacher introduced him to poets such as Carl Sandburg and Walk Whitman, and these became Hughes’s earliest influences. Many other things aided him in his writing development. “Before he was twelve years old, he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and a doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France and Italy.” (DLB)
He was very fascinated and influenced by Harlem’s people and the life itself, there. The Big Sea, the first volume of his autobiography, provided “such a crucial first person account of the era” that much of what we know about the Harlem Renaissance we...