#TYPES OF IMAGERY IN HARLEM BY LANGSTON HUGHES SKIN#
He criticized the divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. In his poems he incorporated the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. Langston Hughes is famous for his poems during the Harlem Renaissance. B.ĭu Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating Eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance: W. Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine Fire, devoted to younger Negro artists. Hughes’s life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. Hughes’s first and last published poems appeared in The Crisis more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal. ” First published in The Crisis in 1921, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” became Hughes’s signature poem which was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues in 1926. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place. Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York. Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. In 1930 his first novel, Not without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. In Lincoln, Illinois, Hughes had begun writing poetry. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice, and his interests revolved more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. His tuition provided Hughes left his father after more than a year. Eventually, Hughes and his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer. Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. I didn’t understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much. Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico: “I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people.