Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His father was James
Nathaniel and his mother was Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes. His grandfather was Charles Langston, an
Ohio abolitionist. As a young boy he lived in Buffalo, New York, Cleveland, Ohio, Lawrence, Kansas,
Mexico City, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Kansas City, Kansas. In 1914 his parents
divorced and he, his mother, and his stepfather moved to Lincoln, Illinois. In high school back in
Cleveland, he was elected class poet, and editor of the senior class yearbook. He taught English to some
families in Mexico in 1921 and also published his first prose piece, "Mexican Games"(Davis). In an
excerpt from an article about Langston Hughes in Encarta 97, it says that he was discovered in 1925, while
he was working as a busboy in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., when he accidentally left three of his
poems next to the plate of Vachel Lindsay, an American poet. She helped him ge!
t publicity for his works and she got him seriously started in writing(Encarta). In an article about Langston
Hughes in The Reference Library of Black America it talks about all the places in the world that Hughes
has traveled. He probably used much of the information of the cultures of other countries to write. Hughes
traveled all over the world as a seaman. He went to the Soviet Union, Haiti, Japan, Spain, Genoa, France,
and other parts of Europe. Hughes was an auth...

Langston Hughes

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