Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri and lived in Kansas and Ohio before studying at Columbia University and later and more fully at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Hughes’s poetry offers a transcription of urban life through a portrayal of the speech, habits, attitudes, and feelings of an oppressed people. The poems do more, however, than reveal the pain of poverty. They also illustrate racial pride and dignity. Hughes’s poems cling, moreover, to the spoken language and need to be read aloud to be fully appreciated. Hughes himself became famous for his public readings, which were sometimes accompanied by a glee club or jazz combo, underscoring the importance of music in his poetry. Hughes, a prolific writer, also wrote plays, fiction, and nonfiction.

Major Works by Hughes (poetry unless noted)

The Weary Blues (1926)

Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play (1932)

The Ways of White Folks (1934, fiction)

The Big Sea (1940, prose)

Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)

Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943)

Freedom's Plow (1943)

Lament for Dark Peoples and Other Poems (1944)

Fields of Wonder (1947)

One-Way Ticket (1949)

Simple Speaks His Mind (1950, prose)

Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952, fiction)

Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz (1961)

The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (1967)

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994)

Hughes and the Web

Here's a great start page from the Academy of American Poets. It includes a photo, links to poems, a biography, a bibliography, and some other links.

This page from the Modern American Poetry website features explications of dozens of Hughes' poems, a biography, bibliography, and information on lynching and the Great Depression.