Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a prolific writer. In the forty-odd years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. He wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of "editorial" and "documentary" fiction, twenty plays, children's poetry, musicals and operas, three autobiographies, a dozen radio and television scripts and dozens of magazine articles.
He was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, and he was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."
In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, / Rounders, / Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses — / Dream-singers all."
That Hughes was a Freethinker is perhaps suggested by his short story, "Salvation," which tells of a childhood memory in which Hughes stops believing in Jesus.
Click to read - OR to listen to the poet read, “I, Too Sing America…”
Comments