Langston Hughes is hero to us because he used his skill in writing poetry as a means to make the world a better, and more equal, place. He was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Born in Missouri, Langston attend Columbia University, but left after one year to travel. He published his first book in 1926. Known as one of the founding fathers of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes continuously fought for social justice and racial equality through his literature. To support himself throughout his early writing career Hughes worked as a steward on a freighter that took him to Africa and Spain, before resettling in the U.S. in 1924. He was the first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban blacks in his work.
After his graduation from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes published his first novel, Not Without Laughter. The book was commercially successful enough to convince Hughes that he could make a living as a writer. During the 1930s, Hughes would frequently travel the United States on lecture tours, and also abroad to the Soviet Union, Japan, and Haiti. He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in 1934 he published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.
In July 1936 he published one of his most celebrated poems, “Let America Be America Again” in Esquire, which examined the unrealized hopes and dreams of the country’s lower class and disadvantaged, expressing a sense of hope that the American Dream would one day arrive. Hughes would later revise and republish “Let America Be America Again” in a small anthology of poems called A New Song.
In 1951 Hughes published one of his most celebrated poems, “Harlem (What happens to a dream deferred?’),” discussing how the American Dream falls short for African Americans.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
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