Langston Hughes is one of the world's most wildly acclaimed Black writers. His writings included poems, plays, short stories, syndicated columns, biographies and two autobiographies, children's books, anthologies, histories, songs, and almost any other mode of literary expression. His works have been presented on the stage and screen, radio and television, and on phonograph recordings by some of the greatest artists of our times.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, Langston Hughes grew up in Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio. His literary career began as class poet in the eighth grade and continued at Cleveland's Central High School where he was a member of the school magazine staff and editor of the class yearbook. His first poem to be published in a national magazine, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", appeared in The Crisis in 1921. He was awarded Opportunity Magazine's First Prize in Poetry in 1925 for his work "The Weary Blues", which was later used as the title for his first book of poems.
Hughes did not enjoy his first experience at college so he dropped out of Columbia University and hopped a freighter to parts unknown. After a few months in Africa, France, and Italy, he returned to the states and enrolled at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania). It was during this time that his talents came to the attention of the eminent poet Vachel Lindsay who was so immediately impressed by Hughes's work that he read three of Hughes's poems on a program in which he was participating at the Little Theatre of the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. Hughes was working at the hotel as a busboy at the time. When he graduated from Lincoln University in 1929, he had won the Palms Intercollegiate Poetry Award and in 1931, he received the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. Dr. Charles A. Beard included him in his selection of America's 25 most "interesting personages with a socially conscious attitude." On October 24, 1935, Hughes's first play, Mulatto, opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on Broadway and that same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Over the years he had his short stories, poems, and articles published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Theatre Arts, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Ebony, and The Nation. He wrote weekly columns which appeared in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. His wide acclaim as a writer put him in great demand on the national and international lecture circuit.
Hughes wrote for radio, motion pictures, Broadway revues, and musical numbers; and for artists such as Marian Anderson, Lawrence Tibbett, and Muriel Rahn. During the war, he created several radio scripts for the Writers' War Board and composed a ballad opera for the British Broadcasting Company. He wrote the lyrics for the Broadway musical Street Scene and the librettoes for the operas Troubled Island and The Barrier.
In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Hughes received other awards including a Rosenwald Fellowship, 1941; American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1946; the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People's Spingarn Medal, 1960; and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1961. In addition to Mulatto, Hughes also wrote the plays Don't You Want to Be Free, Simply Heavenly, Shakespeare in Harlem, Black Nativity, Tambourines to Glory, and Jericho Jim Crow.
At the time of his death in 1967, Hughes had 25 titles listed in Books in Print and his works have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, and Japanese. He was one of the nation's truly outstanding literary figures whose work was equally popular throughout the world.