90 Fun Facts About Langston Hughes

In which Missouri city was Langston Hughes born?

Joplin. For decades his birth year was given as 1902, until old newspaper notices found in 2018 suggested he had been born a year earlier.

Hughes is best known as a leader of which cultural movement?

The Harlem Renaissance never dazzled him: ordinary people 'hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance', he wrote, and if they had, 'it hadn't raised their wages any'.

Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' was first published in 1921 in which magazine?

The Crisis, the NAACP's magazine, was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and when the poem went into Hughes's first collection five years later he dedicated it to him.

Hughes wrote 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' just after finishing what?

High school. He said the whole poem came in ten or fifteen minutes on a train at sunset, and he wrote it on the back of an envelope.

Which four rivers does Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' name, moving from the ancient world to America?

Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi: the last was under his train as he wrote, and the poem sees its muddy water turn 'all golden in the sunset'.

Which literary editor brought Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' to W. E. B. Du Bois?

Jessie Fauset asked Du Bois who in America 'writes like that and yet is unknown to us'. Hughes later counted her among the three people who 'midwifed' the new Black writing into being.

What was the title of Hughes's first poetry collection, published in 1926?

The Weary Blues reached the publisher Alfred A. Knopf through the critic Carl Van Vechten, a new friend who also wrote the book's introduction.

Hughes won a 1925 poetry prize from Opportunity, the magazine of which civil rights organisation?

The National Urban League ran the magazine's contests to show off new Black writers, and it worked: Zora Neale Hurston was another of that year's prizewinners.

Which university did Hughes attend in 1921 before dropping out?

Columbia kept him for one year. He earned a B+ average but met prejudice on campus, and spent his free hours in nearby Harlem, which he liked far better than his classes.

From which historically Black university did Langston Hughes graduate in 1929?

Lincoln, in rural Pennsylvania, got more than a famous graduate: Hughes left the university his personal library, and its main library now carries his name.

Hughes was 'discovered' in 1925 when he left three poems by poet Vachel Lindsay's dinner plate while working as what?

A hotel busboy, at Washington's Wardman Park. Lindsay announced his find, and the next day newspapers around the country were writing about the 'busboy poet'.

Langston Hughes worked in 1925 as personal assistant to which pioneering Black historian in Washington?

Carter G. Woodson, who launched Negro History Week a year later, had him working on a vast listing of free Black families in 1830. Hughes admired him but quit, because the job left no time to write.

What did Langston Hughes throw into the sea in 1923 as his freighter left New York for Africa?

His books. He heaved his college texts and the rest over the rail, and wrote that it felt 'like throwing a million bricks out of my heart'.

Which 1926 Hughes essay became the manifesto of the younger Black writers?

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain opens with a young poet who wanted to be 'a poet, not a Negro poet'. The mountain, Hughes wrote, was that urge 'toward whiteness'.

What was Fire!!, the 1926 magazine Hughes co-founded, meant to do?

Shake up racial ideas: Hughes said the name meant it would 'burn up' the 'old, dead conventional' thinking of the past. It lasted one issue and sank in debt, which its editor spent years paying off.

What did Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston stop to collect on their 1927 drive north from Alabama?

Folk songs and tall tales. Hughes could not drive, so Hurston took the wheel of her little Nash coupé, 'Sassy Susie', and they stopped for guitar players and conjure men.

Which play, co-written by Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in 1930, ended the two friends' relationship?

Mule Bone sat unstaged for sixty years. Hughes wrote on his copy, 'This play was never done because the authors fell out', and it reached Broadway only in 1991, after both had died.

In Hughes's poem 'Mother to Son', a mother tells her boy that life for her 'ain't been no' what?

Crystal stair. Hers has had tacks, splinters and bare boards, she says, but she is still climbing, and she tells her son not to turn back or sit down on the steps.

In his memoir chapter 'Salvation', the young Hughes cries in bed because he lied in church about seeing whom?

Jesus. Going on thirteen, he waited at a revival to see a light, saw nothing and stood up just to end the service, then cried in bed that night for having fooled the whole church.

Which wealthy white patron, whom Hughes had to call 'Godmother', funded him in the late 1920s until a bitter break?

Charlotte Osgood Mason wanted him to write as a 'primitive'. Hughes answered that he was not Africa but 'Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem', and her money stopped.

Hughes's first short-story collection, published in 1934, was titled what?

The Ways of White Folks came out of a year in a borrowed cottage at Carmel, California, where he wrote ten or twelve hours a day and finished about a story a week.

Hughes sailed to Moscow in 1932 with a group of young Black Americans to make what?

A film. Black and White was to show race relations in America, with Hughes fixing its English dialogue, but the Soviet studio dropped it and never told the group why.

Which writer, then a Communist, did Hughes befriend in Soviet Central Asia in 1932?

Arthur Koestler travelled through Turkmenistan with him. The fastidious Koestler raged at the dirt, and Hughes titled a memoir chapter 'Koestler Washes His Hands'.

Reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hughes spent months under fire in which besieged city?

Madrid. The Baltimore Afro-American sent him to write about the Black Americans who had volunteered to fight Franco, and he broadcast to the United States from the city.

Which award did Hughes win in 1935 to support nine months of creative writing?

A Guggenheim Fellowship, given for fiction, paid for nine months of writing from March 1936. His famous journeys had other backers: the Soviet trip came three years earlier, and newspapers sent him to Spain.

For which Black newspaper did Hughes write a weekly column for twenty years from 1942?

The Chicago Defender ran the column from 1942, and the Harlem barfly who first spoke up in it later moved with Hughes's column to the New York Post.

What was the name of the Harlem everyman character Hughes began writing about in 1943?

Jesse B. Semple grew out of a real chat: a man told Hughes he made cranks at work, and when asked what the cranks cranked, said he had no idea, because nobody ever told him.

Hughes's poem 'Harlem' opens with what question?

What happens to a dream deferred? The eleven-line poem answers only with more questions, and Martin Luther King Jr. went on to echo its language in his speeches.

Which 1959 play took its title from a line in Hughes's poem 'Harlem'?

A Raisin in the Sun drew on Lorraine Hansberry's own childhood: her father fought a whites-only housing covenant all the way to the Supreme Court.

Hughes said his 1951 book-length poem about Harlem borrowed its broken rhythms from which style of jazz?

Bebop. His note to the book says the poem, 'like be-bop', is marked by 'conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms', as in a jam session.

Hughes's eight-line poem 'Dreams' opens with which piece of advice?

Hold fast to dreams, he urges, because if they die 'life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly'. The second verse swaps the bird for a barren field frozen with snow.

Which Senator's subcommittee summoned Hughes to testify in 1953?

Joseph McCarthy's counsel Roy Cohn did the questioning. Hughes agreed that left-wing ideas had shaped some of his writing, denied ever joining the Communist Party, and named no one else.

Which was the first volume of Langston Hughes's autobiography, published in 1940?

The Big Sea takes its title from its last lines, where he calls literature 'a big sea full of many fish' and says he let down his nets and pulled.

With which close friend did Hughes co-edit the 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro?

Arna Bontemps had already written a children's book with him, Popo and Fifina. The two met in 1924, stayed close for life, and left a published volume of their letters.

Which honour did the NAACP award Hughes in 1960?

The Spingarn Medal closed a circle: it was founded by Joel Spingarn, whose wife Amy had paid Hughes's college tuition back in the 1920s.

Whose first published story, 'To Hell with Dying', did Hughes print in an anthology he edited?

Alice Walker wrote the story as a student, and her teacher, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, sent it to Hughes. Walker later wrote a children's biography of him.

Hughes's grandmother's first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, died taking part in what event?

John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry left her a widow with her husband's bullet-torn shawl. She kept it all her life and used to wrap the young Langston in it.

Which poet did the teenage Hughes call his 'guiding star' and set out to imitate in high school?

Carl Sandburg's free verse showed him that a poem need not rhyme. A Cleveland English teacher brought it to class, and 'then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg', he recalled.

Hughes said he was elected class poet in grammar school because of what?

A stereotype that Black people have rhythm got him the job, he joked. He wrote a poem for the graduation, everybody applauded, and 'that was the way I began to write poetry'.

Hughes's ashes lie beneath the foyer floor of which Harlem institution?

The Schomburg Center laid them under a floor design named Rivers, so his line 'My soul has grown deep like the rivers' now marks his resting place.

Lines from which Hughes poem are carved on a wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

I, Too answers Walt Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing' in the voice of the 'darker brother' who is sent to eat in the kitchen, and who promises that tomorrow he will be at the table.

Which presidential candidate borrowed his 2004 campaign slogan from Hughes's poem 'Let America Be America Again'?

John Kerry's aides lifted the title. The poem itself, first printed in Esquire in 1936, is no cheer: it speaks for the poor and shut-out who never got the America they were promised.

In 2002 the US Postal Service honoured Hughes in which long-running stamp series?

Black Heritage. The 34-cent stamp came out on 1 February 2002 to mark what was then believed to be his hundredth birthday; by today's reckoning he would have been 101.

Which Francophone literary movement of the 1930s did Hughes's poetry help inspire?

Négritude grew among Black students in 1930s Paris who had discovered America's new Black poets, Hughes among them; one of the students, Léopold Senghor, became Senegal's first president.

In which Kansas town did Hughes spend most of his childhood, raised by his grandmother?

Lawrence was a lonely place for him. 'I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother', he wrote, and it was then that he escaped into reading.

Hughes's father agreed to pay for university only if his son studied what?

Engineering, ideally at a university abroad: his father wanted a practical career for him and had no time for poetry. Hughes bargained for New York instead, and lasted one year.

In which country did Hughes's father settle after leaving the United States?

Mexico was his father's escape from American prejudice, yet James Hughes came to despise other Black Americans. His son, who said he 'liked Negroes very much', never understood it.

Hughes began the libretto for Troubled Island, a 1949 opera about which revolution?

The Haitian Revolution, through its leader Dessalines. Hughes left the libretto unfinished when he went abroad as a reporter, and the pianist who completed it married the composer, William Grant Still.

Which blues singer did Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston hear in Macon, Georgia, in 1927 and find staying at their hotel?

Bessie Smith could be heard 'blocks away' from the theatre, Hughes wrote. At the hotel she told them that white singers could never 'get low down enough' for the blues.

Which composer wrote the music for Street Scene, the 1947 Broadway opera with lyrics by Langston Hughes?

Kurt Weill had fled Nazi Germany fourteen years earlier. He called the piece an 'American opera', and chose the poet of Harlem to give its tenement characters their words.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Roger admit he wanted the purse money to buy?

Blue suede shoes were his goal, not food. Mrs. Jones had guessed that hunger drove him, and his honest answer is what leads her to talk about her own youth.

How does Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am' end for Roger after Mrs. Jones shuts her door behind him?

He never sees her again: the door shuts while he is still searching for something more to say than thanks. One evening of trust is all the two of them ever share.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Mrs. Jones say Roger could have done instead of stealing?

He could have just asked her, Mrs. Jones says, a reply that stuns a boy braced for a scolding or the police. She follows it by admitting that she once wanted things too.

Freed beside an open door in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Roger choose to do?

Wash his face is what he does: he looks at the door, looks at her, and walks to the sink. Staying when he could run is the first sign that her trust is working on him.

What does Mrs. Jones hand Roger at the door at the end of Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

Ten dollars is her parting gift, enough for the very thing he tried to rob her for. She adds a warning never to snatch anyone's pocketbook again.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what snaps and sends Roger sprawling as he grabs the purse?

The strap breaks at his tug, and the weight of the heavy bag topples him onto his back. The woman he took for an easy target then hauls him up by his shirt.

What supper does Mrs. Jones heat up from her icebox for Roger in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

Lima beans and ham come out of the icebox, served with a cup of cocoa. The plain meal shows a woman of modest means sharing what little she has with a stranger.

Over supper in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', Mrs. Jones talks about her job in what business?

A beauty shop in a hotel, one that stays open late, is where she works. She talks about it instead of asking Roger anything that might embarrass him.

Around what time is Mrs. Jones walking home alone when Roger strikes in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

Eleven at night is roughly the hour, and she is alone on the street. Roger, a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, has badly misjudged the woman he picked as a target.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Roger ask if Mrs. Jones plans to do with him?

Take him to jail is what he fears, but she brushes the idea off. Her mind is already on whether the boy has had any supper.

What does Mrs. Jones confess about her own past to Roger in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

She did shameful things, she admits, back when she was young and wanted what she could not have. The confession puts her beside Roger instead of above him.

From which point of view does Hughes tell 'Thank You, Ma'am', the story of Roger and Mrs. Jones?

Third person narration reports both characters from outside, mostly through their talk. It still slips into Roger's head at the moment he decides he wants to be trusted.

While Mrs. Jones cooks in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Roger offer to do for her?

Go to the store is his offer, in case she needs milk. She turns it down, but the offer shows a boy who came to rob her now trying to be useful.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', which subject does Mrs. Jones take care never to ask Roger about?

His home and family stay off the table: she asks nothing that might embarrass him and talks about her own work instead. He has already told her nobody is home at his house.

With her purse left out in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', which spot does Roger pick to sit in?

Where she can see him is the spot he picks, on purpose. She has stopped watching him or her bag, and he finds he wants to deserve that.

What first name does Mrs. Bates Washington Jones announce to Roger in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

Luella is the name, announced in full as Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones while she marches him up the street. She promises he will remember her after tonight.

To what kind of home does Mrs. Jones drag Roger in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am'?

A rooming house is where she lives, in one big room with a kitchenette at the back. Roger can hear other roomers laughing through open doors, yet he does not run.

After supper in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', Mrs. Jones cuts Roger a piece of what dessert?

A ten-cent cake is the dessert, and she gives him half of it. The cheap treat shows how little she has, which makes her generosity that night count for more.

Before supper in Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', what does Mrs. Jones suggest Roger do to look presentable?

Comb his hair is the order, so that he will look presentable at her table. She treats the would-be thief like a guest worth tidying up for.

During which troubled period did Langston Hughes write 'Let America Be America Again'?

The Great Depression still gripped the country when Hughes wrote the poem in 1935, and he was struggling to support himself. He saw that much of the country shared the hardship.

What does the speaker of Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' keep saying about the ideal America?

It was never his, he says again and again in asides that cut against each stanza of patriotic praise. The opening wish is ironic: for him there is no golden age to go back to.

In Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again', which people does the speaker describe as driven from the land?

Native Americans are one of several groups the speaker claims to be, along with poor whites, the descendants of slaves and newcomers from abroad. He speaks as everyone the promise left out.

How does Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' end, after the speaker lists the nation's failures?

With a hopeful vow, the speaker swears that the America of the promise will come to exist. That turn, from a list of grievances to a pledge, keeps the poem from being a lament.

In Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again', whom does the speaker call on to take the country back?

Ordinary people, the workers and outcasts whose labour built the country, are the only ones he trusts to reclaim it. No leader or institution is asked to do it for them.

After its rhymed opening, Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' shifts into which style?

Free verse takes over as the poem grows more critical of its subject. It abandons tidy form at the same moment the speaker abandons the tidy patriotic story.

Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' mentions millions living on relief under which government programme?

The New Deal ran temporary work programmes to cut mass unemployment, and millions depended on them when the poem was written. The speaker asks how such a land can call itself free.

Where was Langston Hughes when he wrote 'Let America Be America Again' in 1935?

On a train from New York City to Ohio, Hughes brooded over his life as a struggling writer and set the poem down.

Which frontier figure does Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' picture seeking a free home?

The pioneer stands for the old promise of a fresh start, and the figure returns later in the poem. Hughes links those first settlers to the hard-pressed workers of his own day.

Which punctuation sets apart the speaker's early asides in Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again'?

Parentheses carry the asides, each one undercutting the stanza before it. Tucked away like that, they read as a truth the country's story has chosen to ignore.

In Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again', the farmer is bound to the soil; to what is the worker bound?

The machine owns the worker as surely as the soil owns the farmer, the speaker says. His point is that labour in a society run for profit leaves people no freer than bondage did.

To which creatures does Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' liken those who live off other people's labour?

Leeches is his word for those who feed on the lives of working people. It comes just after he shrugs off whatever ugly names his critics may call him.

Which rhyme scheme do the three opening quatrains of Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' follow?

ABAB is the pattern, the same alternating rhyme a Shakespearean sonnet uses. Each of the three quatrains is followed by an aside from the speaker that stands outside the pattern.

Which magazine first published Langston Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again', in its July 1936 issue?

Esquire printed it in July 1936, a year after it was written. Another magazine reprinted the poem in 1937, and Hughes revised it for a small collection the year after.

Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' recalls dreamers who lived as what under Old World kings?

Serfs were peasants forced to work a lord's land in feudal Europe. Hughes uses them to argue that American workers, for all the talk of a New World, were living under much the same yoke.

Which device names the repeated line openings Hughes uses throughout 'Let America Be America Again'?

Anaphora, the repeating of a word at the start of successive lines, makes the opening sound like an invocation. It recurs through the poem and gives the speaker's long lists their drumbeat.

Which homeland does Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' name beside Ireland and England?

Poland joins Ireland and England in the speaker's list of places the dreamers fled. He sets those refugees beside the enslaved, who came with no choice at all.

Which metre do the opening stanzas of Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' loosely follow?

Iambic pentameter, the five-beat line of Shakespeare's sonnets, is only roughly kept in the first stanzas: some lines drop their opening unstressed beat.

Which 1938 Hughes collection from the International Workers Order carried a revised 'Let America Be America Again'?

A New Song was a small collection, and its publisher was a fraternal insurance society later shut down over its Communist ties. Hughes revised the poem for it.

The American Dream questioned in Hughes's 'Let America Be America Again' was a phrase popularised by which writer?

James Truslow Adams made the phrase famous in his 1931 book The Epic of America, written in the depths of the Depression only four years before Hughes wrote the poem.

In Hughes's 'Thank You, Ma'am', how does Mrs. Jones first react when Roger lands on the sidewalk?

She kicks him where he sits, then pulls him up by his shirt and gives him a hard shaking. Roger had picked the wrong woman to rob.