Key Events
Langston Hughes, a well known American poet, was born in Joplin Missouri on February 1, 1902. Langston was born in a time when racial segregation in the USA was very intense. Langston's father studied to become lawyer, but was denied the opportunity to take the Bar Exam due to his color.When he was a young child, his parents divorced, and soon after their divorce, his father moved to Mexico to become a businessman and landowner. His father believed that Mexico was a good place for black people to live and own property, because in American white people owned everything. Langston went to live with his grandmother, because his mom was always moving around looking for work. His grandmother would tell him the stories when black people were slaves. Despite all the obstacles in Langston's life, he began to fall in love with books, which were his escape. Langston's grandmother passed away when he was 13, soon following that, Langston went to live with his mother and step-father in Lincoln, IL. Once he was in High School, he began writing poems from his school magazine. Langston wanted to write his stories about treating people equally; he wanted his work to be very inspiring so that people would still read his work even when he was dead. His mother was very supportive of Langston's entusiams for literature, but his father was not the same. Langston's father wanted Langston to study in Switzerland to become an engineer. At the tender age of 19, Langston's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in the Crisis magazine. Following the success of his poem, Langston's father decided to send him to Columbia. After a year at Columbia, Langston withdrew and decided to travel. Hughes loved jazz music and incorporated it into his poems. At age 24, Langston enrolled in Lincoln University, an all-black college near Oxford, Pennsylvannia. He published a book of poems called Fine Clothes to the Jews, which was mis-understood by some critics. Today this is considered his most important work. Hughes became an activist, and traveled sharing his poems about equality to everyone. He was the first black writer to earn his living by writing. Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967 and will always be remembered for all he gave to American literature.