He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hailed as “the Negro Poet Laureate,” Hughes died in his beloved Harlem on May 22, 1967.Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He continued to devote his pen to the ideals of his youth, and took an increasing interest in the movement toward Afrocentric values for black Americans. As those dreams began to bear fruit in the tumultuous 60’s, Hughes was lionized with increasing frequency. and the civil rights movement, “Fight for Freedom,” chart Hughes’s long commitment to comradeship and equality.

His novel Tambourines to Glory (1958) appeared as a musical play (1963), and his two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, together with his essay about his involvement with the N.A.A.C.P. Among his many poetry collections, The Negro Mother (1931), The Dream Keeper (1932), and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) argue passionately for his belief in human equality, his wish for color-blind brotherhood, and his growing disillusionment with the American dream. It captured both the Opportunity Prize and the prestigious Spingarn Award, and financed for Hughes the completion of his education, at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Hughes’s prolific literary career was launched in 1926 with a volume of jazz poems called The Weary Blues, written for performance with musical accompaniment in the famous Harlem clubs of the era. He would receive patronage from the formidable but controlling Charlotte Mason, make voyages of self-discovery to Africa and Europe, and return to the United States with a freer, more confident vision of his own identity as an African-American, an artist, a leftist (he would later spend some time in Russia and answer for it during the McCarthy hearings), and a homosexual. For the remainder of the decade he would associate with all her prominent figures–Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and Carl Van Vechten. When funds for college dried up, Hughes moved to Harlem at the height of its golden era. There, with some money sent by his father, he enrolled in Columbia University, wrote his first verse, and began to publish in The Crisis, the historic magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., founded by W.E.B. Eventually the young man arrived in New York City in 1921.

Langston Hughes’s childhood was marked by poverty, the separation of his parents (his father emigrated to Mexico, where Hughes would later visit), a matriarchal, church-going education, and a nomadic series of moves.

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