Langston Hughes College Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Langston Hughes College - Essay Example Hughes published more than thirty-five books that utilized such diverse formats as poetry, scripts, operas, essays, and musicals aimed at both children's and adult audiences. Langston Hughes was able to not only illustrate what it meant to be black, but he was also able to show blacks what it meant to be American. Langston Hughes's love of writing and his social consciousness were formulated during his early years as a black child living in the early 1900s. Born in 1902 to a family with a deep literary tradition and a convention for education, Hughes gravitated towards writing at an early age. Hughes's father, James Nathaniel Hughes, studied law and moved to Mexico after being denied admittance to the bar in the Oklahoma Territory, leaving his wife and young Langston behind. Unable to support her young child, Carrie Hughes moved from job to job in Missouri and Kansas, while young Langston stayed with his maternal grandmother for most of the next decade in Lawrence Kansas. Langston was briefly reunited with his father in Mexico in 1908, but by this time he had already begun to reject the materialism sought by his father (Tracy 25). Langston had become keenly aware of the difference between wealth and poverty, and the social value of both. Langston Hughes was exposed to other writers in his family at an early age. His mother "demonstrated a dramatic imagination through writing poetry and delivering monologues in costume" (Tracy 25). His great-uncle, John Mercer Langston, attained some literary notoriety with an autobiography published under the title From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital in 1894 (Tracy 25). Hughes's imagination was spurred on further by his grandmother's imagination and a visit to the Topeka library. He would remark later in life that, "even before I was six books began to happen to me, so that after a while there came a time when I believed in books more than in people which, of course, was wrong" (Tracy 26). Hughes briefly returned to Mexico in 1921 to live with his father, and it was then that he penned "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", arguably his first important work. It was published in 1922 by the W.E.B. DuBois publication Crisis, thus launching his long literary career. Hughes's early childhood experiences and his literary success with the Crisis placed him as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. By 1920 several major black organizations such as the NAACP and The Urban League, had located their offices in Harlem, New York. Harlem had become a magnet for black America as African-Americans were defining their American identity. Taylor describes the rising tide of black dignity as follows: As Harlem consolidated its role as a "black belt," it took on a powerful significance for writers and artists. From 1919 to 1929 the cultural movement defining the neighborhood's heyday took place: the Harlem Renaissance. Those were the years, wrote Langston Hughes, when "Harlem was in vogue." The philosophy and art that came out of Harlem at this time have had a lasting significance for the development of modern black consciousness. (7) The crucible of Harlem with its conflict and fury would propel Hughes to develop an individual style that shaped the future of black America, black literature, and the Civil Rights movement. It was in Harlem that Langston Hughes gained widespread acceptance as an important American writer. During the early 1920s,