What was langston hughes childhood like

The mother is oriented to the middle-class values of the white world; the father believes that fun and laughter are the only things worth pursuing.

Though the boy's character is blurred, Hughes's attention to the details of African American culture in America gives the novel insight and power. The relative commercial success of Not without Laughter inspired Hughes to make his living as an author. In he made the first of what became annual lecture tours. The following year he took a trip to the Soviet Union, the former country that today consists of Russia and other smaller nations.

Meanwhile, he turned out poems, essays, book reviews, song lyrics, plays, and short stories. He edited five books of African American writing and worked with Arna Bontemps on another and on a book for children.

As a newspaper columnist for the Chicago Defender, Hughes created "Simple. The sketches of Simple, collected in five volumes, are presented as conversations between an uneducated, African American city dweller, Jesse B.

Semple Simple , and an educated but less sensitive African American friend. The sketches that ran in the Defender for twenty-five years are varied in subject and remarkable in their relevance to the universal human condition. That Simple is a universal man, even though his language, habits, and personality are the result of his particular experiences as an African American man, is a measure of Hughes's genius.

Hughes received numerous fellowships scholarships , awards, and honorary degrees, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award for a book on improving race relations. He taught creative writing at two universities; had his plays produced on four continents; and made recordings of African American history, music commentary, and his own poetry. His work, some of which was translated into a dozen languages, earned him an international reputation.

Forty-seven volumes bear Hughes's name. He died in New York City on May 22, Cooper, Floyd. New York: Philomel Books, Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. He was often left alone because his mother was at work. Even though his childhood was difficult and had lots of changes, he was able to use these things in the poetry that he started to write while he was at school. He never forgot the stories of his grandmother and tried to help other African-Americans when they were having problems.

These were the people that he later wrote about in his own stories. When Hughes went to school in Lincoln, there were only two African-American children in the class. The teacher talked to them about poetry. She said that what a poem needed most was rhythm. Langston later said that he had rhythm in his blood because, "as everyone knows", all African-Americans have rhythm. The children made him the "class poet". At high school in Cleveland, Ohio , Langston learned to love reading. He wrote articles for the school newspaper, he edited the school yearbook and he wrote his first short stories and plays.

When Langston Hughes was 17, he went to spend some time with his father in Mexico. He was very unhappy there. Hughes could not understand how his father felt. He said: "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much! When he was finished at high school in Lincoln in , he went back to Mexico, to ask his father to pay for him to go to university. Hughes' father was a lawyer and a wealthy landowner.

He could afford to send his son to university but he made difficulties about it. He said that Hughes could only go to university if he went overseas and studied engineering. Knopf, National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem.

Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Langston Hughes — Related Poets. Countee Cullen. Semple, better known as "Simple," a Black Everyman that Hughes used to further explore urban, working-class Black themes, and to address racial issues. The columns were highly successful, and "Simple" would later be the focus of several of Hughes' books and plays.

In the late s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street Scene , which featured music by Kurt Weill. The success of the musical would earn Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University today Clark Atlanta University and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months.

Over the next two decades, Hughes would continue his prolific output. In he wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work, The Poetry of the Negro. In Hughes published one of his most celebrated poems, "Harlem What happens to a dream deferred? What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore — And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— Like a syrupy sweet? Literary scholars have debated Hughes' sexuality for years, with many claiming the writer was gay and included a number of coded references to male lovers in his poems as did Walt Whitman, a major influence on Hughes.