WATCH: Black History Documentaries on HISTORY Vault Jazz PoetryĬalled the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as the father of jazz poetry, a literary genre influenced by or sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by the music. He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Traveling the World I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.Īccording to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up.

Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Hughes was born Febru(although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes.

Hughes the big sea