Langston Hughes spent his formative teenage years in Cleveland, where he attended Central High School in the Fairfax neighborhood. He wrote for the school newspaper and yearbook, and it was there, not in Harlem, that he began writing the poetry, short stories, and dramatic sketches that would define his career. His first piece of jazz poetry, When Sue Wears Red, was written at Central High.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901. His parents separated early, and he was raised largely by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, before moving to Cleveland to live with his mother and stepfather. After high school, he spent a year at Columbia University in New York before dropping out. He worked as a seaman, a busboy, and various other jobs while writing steadily. His poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, composed on a train crossing the Mississippi at seventeen, was published in The Crisis in 1921 and brought him early recognition.
His first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. Hughes wrote in the rhythms of blues and jazz, collapsing the distance between Black vernacular speech and literary form. He was prolific across genres: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, newspaper columns, children’s books, and opera libretti. His Simple stories, featuring Jesse B. Semple, a plainspoken Harlem everyman, ran as a newspaper column for over twenty years.
He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929. Through the 1930s he traveled to the Soviet Union, Spain during the Civil War, and across the American South. He co-founded theater companies in Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His politics drew scrutiny from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee in 1953; Hughes testified but refused to name others.
Hughes died in New York on May 22, 1967, at age 66. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The inscription reads: My soul has grown deep like the rivers.