Langston Hughes was born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri. He was a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of great creativity and thinking, of intense artistic production in the northern US Cities in the 1920s.

This fertile period was produced by the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrial North, who lived in concentrated urban neighbourhoods.

This Renaissance was focused around jazz, a culture of boom and bust, and lasted until the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

His work engages with socioeconomic concerns and the hardships, speaking out against left wing issues. But it also is a vibrant celebration of the street life of Harlem and vernacular culture. Hughes redefines the American Dream through his writing as equal rights and liberty. And as a result, he was even investigated by the McCarthy Committee. His poetry is fascinated with what it is to be an ordinary African American, and the fear of being shaped and standardised by a white society, demanding the need for the preservation of black culture. In his poem ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’, he criticises a young black poet who commented “I want to write like a white poet”. Hughes argues “no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself”. His work promotes the need for creation and artistic expression without fear or shame and to be “free within ourselves”

Stylistically, Hughes is thought of as an early deconstructionist. His early critics accused his work of simplicity or anti-intellectualism. However, other critics entitled him as the ‘People’s Poet’. His writing was accessible and was the common parlance. Its distinctive orature focused on the voices of ordinary people, with the idioms of daily life and street talk, powerfully balanced with irony and humour. He celebrates the richness of everyday speech, rooted in his heritage and a long history of oral culture. They are poems of musical innovation with song like stanzas, syncopated rhythms, call and response and blues like structures that jump off the page.

Langston wrote: “Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America…the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world… and pain swallowed in a smile”. His poetry captures the life of Harlem, with the sharp nuances, the broken rhymes evoking bebop, jazz ragtime and riffs. His poems, novels, short stories and plays beautifully reflect on the immediate present, drawing on tradition and participating in the life of the people around him.

Not Without Laughter

Novels

Langston Hughes