Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes (1901 - 1967) was an American writer and part of the Harlem Renaissance. His most well known works include Remember me to Harlem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and "The Dream Keeper".
- Langston Hughes: BiographyLangston Hughes was an African American writer whose poems, columns, novels and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
- Langston Hughes: Poetry FoundationLangston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem.
Research & Reference
- Langston Hughes: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Langston Hughes. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Langston Hughes PapersThe career of James Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a central figure during the Harlem Renaissance, spanned five decades. He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, newspaper columns, children’s books, and pictorial histories. He also edited several volumes of prose and fiction by African-American and African writers. Through his writing and through his extensive travels and lecture tours he came into direct contact with an amazing array of writers, artists, activists, and performers of the twentieth century. The Langston Hughes Papers span the years 1862-1980.
Hughes' Dream Harlem
Langston Hughes was one of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance and is often referred to as Harlem's poet laureate. This film shows how Hughes successfully fused jazz, blues and common speech to celebrate the beauty of Black life. Hughes' Dream Harlem presents a vision of the esteemed poet in present-day Harlem and makes an important case for Hughes' impact on hip-hop and the spoken-word community.
Source: Kanopy
Author's Works & Perspectives
Remember Me to Harlem
These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten--older, established, and white--was at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship--and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly. They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics ("So now I know what Bessie Smith really meant by 'Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wall,'" Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges). They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common--James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection. Today Van Vechten is a controversial figure; some consider him exploitative, at best peripheral to the Harlem Renaissance--or, indeed, as the author of the novel Nigger Heaven, a blemish upon it, and upon Hughes by association. The letters tell a different, more subtle and complex story: Van Vechten did, in fact, help Hughes (and many other young black writers) to get published; Hughes in turn appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do in Nigger Heaven and defended him, fiercely. For all their differences, Hughes and Van Vechten remained staunchly loyal to each other throughout their lives. A correspondence of great cultural significance, judiciously gathered together here for the first time and annotated by the insightful young scholar Emily Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem shows us an unlikely friendship, one that is essential to our understanding of literature and race relations in twentieth-century America.
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems
"HOLD FAST TO DREAMS / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly." The Dream Keeper, the great African-American writer Langston Hughes's only collection of poems for children, includes some of his best loved works. It is being reissued in a handsome hardcover edition in celebration of its 75th anniversary. Filled with elegant scratchboard illustrations by Caldecott Honor winner Brian Pinkey, and featuring an introduction by noted children's poet Lee Bennett Hopkins, this gift edition is sure to be cherished by young readers and longtime poetry lovers alike.
Not So Simple
The Simple stories, by Langston Hughes, were satirical pieces featuring Harlem's Jesse B. Semple. This book provides an historical analysis of these stories, from his first appearance in 1943 in the Chicago Defender to his 1965 farewell in the New York Post.
Langston Hughes and the *Chicago Defender*
Langston Hughes is well known as a poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, communist sympathizer, and brilliant member of the Harlem Renaissance. He has been referred to as the "Dean of Black Letters" and the "poet low-rate of Harlem." But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose. This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.