"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."
-Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Red Roses
I'm waitin' for de springtime
When de tulips grow—
Sweet, sweet springtime
When de tulips grow;
Cause if I'd die in de winter
They'd bury me under snow.
Un'neath de snow, Lawd,
Oh, what would I do?
Un'neath de snow,
I say what would I do?
It's bad enough to die but
I don't want freezin' too.
I'm waitin' for de springtime
An' de roses red,
Waitin' for de springtime
When de roses red
'Ll make a nice coverin'
Fer a gal that's dead.
About Langston Hughes
Born on February 1st, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, and columnist. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of black artistic, intellectual, and literary life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem.
Early Life, Family, and Writing Poetry
Hughes parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child. His father then moved to Mexico and Hughes was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, until he was thirteen.
He later moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband. The family eventually settled in Cleveland, and it was then that Hughes began writing poetry.
Education, Travelling, and The Weary Blues
After graduating from high school, Hughes spent a year in Mexico, and a year at Columbia University, during which time he worked as a launderer, busboy, and an assistant cook. In 1926, after moving to Washington D.C. Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.
When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy.
In his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, David Littlejohn observed:
"On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if ‘different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. … Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.
Being Free Enough to Express Reality
Hughes strived to portray the reality of working-class, black lives - both the joys and the hardships- without the use of negative stereotypes and sentimental idealization.
This approach, however, made much of his early work the subject of great criticism, for many black intellectuals felt that he was portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life.
In his book Big Sea, Hughes writes,
"Fine Clothes to the Jew [Hughes’s second book] was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low- rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. … The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot."
Faith in Humanity and the American Literary Scene
Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could consciously and with understanding live together led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike other writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that “most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.”
In regard to his position in the American literary scene, David Littlejohn later wrote that Hughes is
"the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. … His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. … By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."
Children's Poetry and Visual Art
The Sweet and Sour Animal Book and The Block are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that place his writing against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book’s title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s, and is combined with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. In the New York Times Book Review, Veronica Chambers noted that the pieces
“reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor.”
She also commented on Hughes's rhymes, noting that
“children love a good rhyme”
and that Hughes gave them
“just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.”
Love, Jazz and Writing for the People
Hughes, who cited Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Paul Laurence Dunbar as his greatest influences wrote plays, short stories, novels, and poetry. He is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the great influence it had on his writing - as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). Hughes's life and work were tremendously important in moulding the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen, Hughes wanted to tell the stories of his people in such a way that reflected their actual culture, including their laughter, language, and love of music, as well as their suffering.
Hughes’s poems have been translated into French, German, Russian, Czech, Spanish, and Yiddish, and many of them have been set to music. In the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Donald B. Gibson noted that Hughes
"has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. … Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.
Body of Work and Death
In addition to his poems, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950).
He edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958) and coedited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps.
He also wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City.
Langston Hughes: Essential Books to Get Now
1. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (paperback)
"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar--. [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music--. This book is a glorious revelation."--Boston Globe
"Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman. Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language."
Get the book on sale at BOOKS-A-MILLION:
2. The Big Sea: An Autobiography (paperback)
Get the book here:
3. The Short Stories of Langston Hughes (paperback)
"Langston Hughes was a prolific writer: the author of plays, poetry, novels, autobiography, and children's tales. But it is in his short stories that readers see most clearly his greatest talents--his gift for humor and irony, his love for the vernacular, his brilliance in depicting character, and his profound perceptions about America. This new collection of 47 stories, written between 1919 and 1963, follows Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his political and personal concerns."
Get the book here:
This blog features several affiliate links, meaning that I'll earn a commission if you purchase through these links.