Q 01/05

In which Missouri city was Langston Hughes born?

A) Springfield

B) Joplin

C) Kansas City

D) St. Louis

Answer · why

B) 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 02/05

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

A) The Lost Generation

B) The Beat Generation

C) The Harlem Renaissance

D) The Black Arts Movement

Answer · why

C) 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 ...

Q 03/05

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

A) The Messenger

B) Negro World

C) The Liberator

D) The Crisis

Answer · why

D) 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 ...

Q 04/05

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

A) College

B) A sea voyage

C) High school

D) His first novel

Answer · why

C) 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 05/05

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

A) Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi

B) Euphrates, Ganges, Amazon, Mississippi

C) Jordan, Zambezi, Nile, Ohio

D) Tigris, Niger, Nile, Hudson

Answer · why

A) 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'.