Langston Hughes (James Mercer Langston Hughes) was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He is of Afro-American and Indian descent. Hughes had a difficult childhood; his father and mother divorced and his father moved to Cuba followed by Mexico in an attempt to avoid racism in the United States. He was mainly raised by his grandmother. Later he went to live with his mother, first in Lincoln, Illinois, then in Cleveland, Ohio where he attended high school.
In 1919 he went to Mexico to his father asking for money to go to college. His father agreed on the condition that he would study engineering instead of literature, which was Hughes' preferred choice. He attended Columbia University but did not complete his studies. He left Columbia in 1922 and had various jobs, including six months on the ship The SS Malone. During this period he traveled through Europe and North Africa and while living in Paris. In 1924 he returned to the United States where he lived in Washington DC with his mother. A year later he restarted studying, this time at Lincoln University, and received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1929.
Hughes then moved to Harlem in New York, where he would spend most of his later life. With his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), he won a literary prize, the Harmon Gold Medal. In 1935 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In
1938 he established a theater company in New York, the Harlem Suitcase
Theater, followed by the New Negro Theater in Los Angeles in 1939 and
the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941.
Like
many writers of his time, Hughes was attracted to communism as an
alternative to racial segregation and racism of the United States. In
1932 he went with a group of other major intellectuals to the Soviet
Union in order to make a film about the oppression of black Americans. The film was never made, however, Hughes used this as an opportunity to travel through the Soviet Union, Japan and China.
In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain as a correspondent of several African American newspapers to show his support of the republicans. He signed a letter of support for Joseph Stalin in 1938 and joined the Communist organization American Peace Mobilization, which had the purpose pf keeping the United States out of WWII. Hughes was never a member of the American Communist Party and had stated that he was not a communist. Langston Hughes was part of the Harlem Renaissance.
