Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father, who had studied to become a lawyer, left for Mexico shortly after the baby was born. When Langston was seven or eight he went to live with his grandmother, who told him wonderful stories about Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and took him to hear Booker T. Washington. She also introduced him to The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, who also wrote The Souls of Black Folk, young Langston's favorite book.After his grandmother died when he was twelve, Langston went to live with her friends, whom he called Auntie and Uncle Reed. Then, at age fourteen, his mother married again, and soon he accompanied his new family to Illinois and then to Cleveland, where Homer Clarke, his mother's new husband, had found work in a steel mill.As a high school student at Central High in Cleveland, Langston read the works of many black writers. After graduation, he went to Mexico to visit his father, who agreed to pay for his college education. On his way through the south, as he was crossing the Mississippi River, Langston wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." It was printed in The Crisis in 1921.Langston entered Columbia University and began living in Harlem, at that time an elegant section on the northern end of Manhattan Island that black people were making their own. The sights and sounds of Harlem, its music and dance and intellectual life, inspired Langston more than his classes in mining engineering, and eventually he quit school. Meanwhile he sent more poems to The Crisis. Having difficulty finding work, Hughes, twenty-one years old, joined the crew of a ship sailing for Africa. Eventually he traveled through Italy, Holland, Spain, and France, writing all the while. Finally he returned to New York, and felt as though he had returned home.An outburst of literary activity followed. Hughes's poetry absorbed the rhythms of blues and jazz and the dialect of African American speech that...
