Langston Hughes

Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and educated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Hughes worked as a seaman, busboy, and teacher in several American cities and abroad. He studied in the Soviet Union and, during the Spanish civil war, was Madrid correspondent for a Baltimore periodical. While no doubt his travels in such differing cultures influenced his philosophy and his perspective, his writing (while always sophisticated) remained fundamentally American (Miller, 1990, p. 31).

As a columnist, Hughes often expressed his views on the frustrations of blacks in the U.S. through the wry, deceptively naive humor of his most famous character, Simple (Jesse B. Semple). Simple also figured in many of Hughes's short stories, collected in The Ways of White Folks (1934), Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), and Best of Simple (1961). Despite the cleverness of the main character, the spare and elegant use of language by Hughes and the clarity and accuracy of his ethnographic observations, Hughes's short stories are not now much read (Miller, 1990, p. 112).

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ere dominated by older residents were supplemented by less formal Baptist or Pentecostal churches that appealed to poor, sometimes illiterate, new arrivals from the rural South. Tensions were evident between the old residents, who frequently performed personal services for whites, and the new migrants, who had difficulty competing for such jobs (Wintz, 1988, p. 117). By the early 20th century, however, many black communities had become large enough to support a minority of black professionals and businesspeople, and earlier deference to white standards among relatively successful blacks gradually gave way to an increasing sense of racial pride and social cohesion. Black fraternal orders, political organizations, social clubs, and newspapers published by blacks asserted an urban black consciousness that became the foundation for the militancy and cultural innovations of the 1920s. Hughes captured this sense of the possibility of truly black art in an article he wrote for the progressive news magazine The Nation in 1926. It is the duty of the younger Negro artist à to change through the force of his art that old whispering ôI want to be white,ö hidden in the aspirations of his people, to ôWhy should I want to be white? I am a Negr
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Approximate Word count = 1904
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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