James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, the second son of James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes (Berry 1). Langston was the last child of his parents' marriage. Berry maintains that Langston Hughes' earliest impressions were of Lawrence, Kansas, where his mother took him to live after his father moved out when he was slightly more than a year old (Berry 3). She argues that the frequent moving about from one place to another, the absence of a father, and the presence of poverty and racial discrimination--each in its way marked him for life, but never made him bitter (Berry 3). The Big Sea, for example, offers a genial, moving account of his life from his birth in Joplin before his mother took him to Lawrence (Rampersad xii).
In the absence of a father, Langston Hughes spent his formative years until the age of puberty under matriarchal influence. This influence would later manifest itself in some of his fiction--most notably in his first autobiographical novel, Not Without Laughter (Berry 6). Lonely as a child, Langston turned for comfort turned to "books, and the wonderful world in books" (Rampersad 1). Later he would recall the inspiration of the Bible in his early life, as well as the inspiration of W. E. B. DuBois, whose The Souls of Black Folk defined for many people the essential drama of people born black in America in the aftermath of the Civil War (Rampersad 1).
Following his grandmother's death in 1915, Langston wrote his first poem. He published stories and poems in the monthly school magazine and was eventually elected Class Poet and editor of the Annual (Rampersad xii). Most important, by graduation, Hughes has tentatively committed himself to becoming a writer--and to writing mainly about the black American experience (Rampersad xii). In May 1925, when he won first prize in a poetry contest, he was ready for a major step in his career. Aided by ...