Langston Hughes (1902-1967), American writer, known for using the rhythms of jazz and of everyday black speech in his poetry. Hughes was one of the first writers to portray the urban black experience realistically. His poems typically express the tribulations and sometimes the joys of ghetto life in plain, spirited language resembling the colloquial speech of American blacks.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, and educated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in Crisis magazine in 1921 and studied at Columbia University from 1921 to 1922. He then lived for a time in Paris. After his return to the United States, he worked as a busboy in Washington, D.C. There, in 1925, his literary skills were discovered after he left three of his poems beside the plate of American poet Vachel Lindsay, who recognized Hughes’s abilities and helped him publish his first volume of verse, Weary Blues (1926). Lindsay subsequently helped publicize Hughes’s work.

Hughes wrote in many genres, but he is best known for his poetry, in which he disregarded classical forms in favor of musical rhythms and the oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture. The musical rhythms are evident in the first lines of “Weary Blues”: “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,/ Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, ...” Many of Hughes’s poems are written in free verse and are documentary in tone, as in “Florida Road Workers.”

In the late 1920s, when Hughes lived in New York City, he became a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance and was referred to as the Poet Laureate of Harlem. His innovations in form and voice influenced many black writers. Hughes also wrote the drama Mulatto (1935), which was performed on Broadway 373 times. Beginning in the 1930s, Hughes was active in social and political causes, using his poetry as a vehicle for social protest. He traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Haiti, and Japan, and he served as the Madrid correspondent for a Baltimore, Maryland, newspaper during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

In the 1940s, first for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post, Hughes wrote a newspaper column in the voice of the character Simple (also called Jesse B. Semple), who expressed the thoughts of young black Americans. Simple’s plain speech, humor, and use of dialect belied his wisdom and common sense. The character became famous and later figured in many of Hughes’s short stories. Hughes died in New York City on May 22, 1967.

Hughes wrote more than 50 books. His works include the poetry volumes The Dream Keeper (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), and Fields of Wonder (1947) and the short-story collections The Ways of White Folks (1934), Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), and Best of Simple (1961). Hughes also wrote the novels Not Without Laughter (1930) and Tambourines to Glory (1958), the autobiographical books The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1957), and the children’s books Black Misery (1969) and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book (written 1936, published 1994). The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes was published in 1994.