Langston Hughes Trivia
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90 free Langston Hughes trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Langston Hughes trivia covers the poet who gave the Harlem Renaissance its voice and, decades later, gave A Raisin in the Sun its title. Born in Joplin, Missouri and raised largely by a grandmother whose first husband died in John Brown's raid, he wrote his signature poem on a train to Mexico at 17, was 'discovered' as a busboy by Vachel Lindsay, dropped out of Columbia, graduated from Lincoln University, and lived most of the rest of his life in Harlem. This quiz follows the whole career: The Crisis and The Weary Blues, the manifesto essay in The Nation, the road trip with Zora Neale Hurston and the play that ended their friendship, the novel that won the Harmon Gold Medal, the Soviet film that never got made, reporting from the Spanish Civil War, twenty years of Chicago Defender columns and the everyman Jesse B. Semple, the McCarthy hearing, and the honours that followed, from the Spingarn Medal to a postage stamp and a floor medallion in the Schomburg Center. Easy questions suit anyone who has read 'Harlem' in school; the expert tier is for people who know their Bontemps from their Van Vechten. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Hughes and his major works, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01In which Missouri city was Langston Hughes born?
Joplin
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.
Q 02Hughes is best known as a leader of which cultural movement?
The Harlem Renaissance
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'.
Q 03Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' was first published in 1921 in which magazine?
The Crisis
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.
Q 04Hughes wrote 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' just after finishing what?
High school
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.
Q 05Which four rivers does Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' name, moving from the ancient world to America?
Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi
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'.
Q 06Which literary editor brought Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' to W. E. B. Du Bois?
Jessie Fauset
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.
Q 07What was the title of Hughes's first poetry collection, published in 1926?
The Weary Blues
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.
Q 08Hughes won a 1925 poetry prize from Opportunity, the magazine of which civil rights organisation?
The National Urban League
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.
Q 09Which university did Hughes attend in 1921 before dropping out?
Columbia
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.
Q 10From which historically Black university did Langston Hughes graduate in 1929?
Lincoln
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.
Q 11Hughes was 'discovered' in 1925 when he left three poems by poet Vachel Lindsay's dinner plate while working as what?
A hotel busboy
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'.
Q 12Langston Hughes worked in 1925 as personal assistant to which pioneering Black historian in Washington?
Carter G. Woodson
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.
Q 13What did Langston Hughes throw into the sea in 1923 as his freighter left New York for Africa?
Q 21Hughes's first short-story collection, published in 1934, was titled what?
The Ways of White Folks
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.
Q 22Hughes sailed to Moscow in 1932 with a group of young Black Americans to make what?
A film
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.
Q 23Which writer, then a Communist, did Hughes befriend in Soviet Central Asia in 1932?
Arthur Koestler
His books
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'.
Q 14Which 1926 Hughes essay became the manifesto of the younger Black writers?
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
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'.
Q 15What was Fire!!, the 1926 magazine Hughes co-founded, meant to do?
Shake up racial ideas
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.
Q 16What did Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston stop to collect on their 1927 drive north from Alabama?
Folk songs and tall tales
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.
Q 17Which play, co-written by Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in 1930, ended the two friends' relationship?
Mule Bone
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.
Q 18In Hughes's poem 'Mother to Son', a mother tells her boy that life for her 'ain't been no' what?
Crystal stair
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.
Q 19In his memoir chapter 'Salvation', the young Hughes cries in bed because he lied in church about seeing whom?
Jesus
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.
Q 20Which wealthy white patron, whom Hughes had to call 'Godmother', funded him in the late 1920s until a bitter break?
Charlotte Osgood Mason
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.
Arthur Koestler travelled through Turkmenistan with him. The fastidious Koestler raged at the dirt, and Hughes titled a memoir chapter 'Koestler Washes His Hands'.
Q 24Reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hughes spent months under fire in which besieged city?
Madrid
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.
Q 25Which award did Hughes win in 1935 to support nine months of creative writing?
A Guggenheim Fellowship
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.
Q 26For which Black newspaper did Hughes write a weekly column for twenty years from 1942?
The Chicago Defender
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.
Q 27What was the name of the Harlem everyman character Hughes began writing about in 1943?
Jesse B. Semple
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.
Q 28Hughes's poem 'Harlem' opens with what question?
What happens to a dream deferred?
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.
Q 29Which 1959 play took its title from a line in Hughes's poem 'Harlem'?
A Raisin in the Sun
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.
Q 30Hughes said his 1951 book-length poem about Harlem borrowed its broken rhythms from which style of jazz?
Bebop
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.