" Langston Hughes" (February 1,1902-May 22,1967)

Was an American Poet,social activist,novelist,playwright,and columnist.He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry.He is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.He famously wrote about that "Harlem was in vogue.Both of his paternal and maternal great-grandfather was of European Jewish descent.Langston was white and of Scottish descent.A paternal great-grandmother was European Jewish descent.Langston maternal grandmother  Mary grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American,French,English and Native American descent.One of the first women to attend Oberlin College,she first married Lewis Sheridan Leary,also of mixed race.Lewis Sheridan Leary subsequently joined John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again,into the elite politically active Langston family.Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston,of African American,Native American,Euro-American ancestry.He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.Charles later moved to Kansas,where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African-Americans.Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes.Langston was born in Joplin Missouri,the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871-1934).Langston grew up in a series of Mideastern small towns.His father left his family and later divorced Carrie going to Cuba,and then Mexico,seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.After the separating of his parents  of his parents,while his mother travelled seeking employment,Langston was raised mainly by his maternal grandmother,Mary Patterson Langston, in Lawrence Kansas.The black American oral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation,Mary instilled in Langston a lasting sense of racial pride.He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence,Kansas.After the death of his grandmother,he went to live with family friends,James and Mary Reed,for two years.Because of the unstable early life,his childhood was not  an entirely happy one,it strongly influenced the poet he would become.Langston lived again with his mother in Lincoln Illinois.She had remarried when he was still an adolescent,and eventually they lived in Cleveland Ohio,where he attended high school.The Hughes' home in Cleveland  was sold in Foreclosure in 1918;the 2.5 wood-frame house on the city's east side was sold at a sheriff  auction in February for $ 16,667.While in grammar school in Lincoln,he was elected class poet.Langston stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm."I was a victim of a Stereotype.There were only two of us Negro kids in the  whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of the rhythm in poetry.Well,everyone knows ,except us,that all Negroes have rhythm,so they elected me as class poet.During high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote for the school newspaper,edited the yearbook,and began to write his first short stories,poetry,and dramatic plays.His first piece of jazz poetry,"When Sue Wears Red"was written while in high school.It was during this time that he discovered his love of books.Langston had a very poor relationship with his father.He lived with his father in Mexico to live for a brief period in 1919.Upon graduating from high school in June 1920,he returned to Mexico to live with his father,hoping to convince him to support his plan to attend Columbia University.Langston later said that,prior to arriving in Mexico:"I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people.I didn't understand it,because I was a negro,and i liked Negroes very much.Initially,his father had hoped for Langston to attend a university abroad,and to study for a career in engineering.On these grounds,he was willing  to provide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer.Eventually,Langston and his father came to a compromise:Langston would study engineering,so long he could attend Columbia.His tuition provided;Langston left his father after more than a year.While at Columbia in 1921,he managed to maintain  a B+ grade average.He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice,and his interests revolved more around the neighbourhood of Harlem than his studies,he continued writing poetry.Langston worked various jobs,before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the SS Malone IN 1923,spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe.In Europe,he left the SS Malone for a temporary stay in Paris.During his time in England in the early 1920s,Langston became part of the black expatriate community.In November 1924,he returned to the U.S. to live with his mother in Washington,D.C. he worked at various odd jobs before gaining a white-collar job in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter Godwin Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.As the work demands limited his time for writing.Langston quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel.There he encountered the poet Vachel Lindsay,with whom he shared some poems.Impressed with the poems,Vachel publicized his discovery of a new black poet.by this time,Langston earlier work had been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.The following year,he enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County,Pennsylvania.He joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.Thurgood Marshall,who later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,was an alumnus and classmate of Langston during his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University.After Langston earned a B.A. from Lincoln University in 1929,he returned to New York.Except for travels to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean,he lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life.During the 1930s,Langston became a resident of Westfield,New Jersey.Langston died from complications after abdominal surgery,realted to prostate cancer,at the age of 65.