Langston Hughes wrote a foundational text for the Harlem Renaissance

Read Langston Hughes’ most famous poems

The writer is considered one of the most important voices in American verse, noted for his use of authentic vernacular, vivid imagery, and jazz-inspired rhythm in poems such as “Harlem,” “I, Too,” and “The Weary Blues.

Hughes wrote for and about everyday Black Americans

Early in his career, Hughes was often disregarded by prominent white literary critics and criticized by Black intellectuals for his sometimes negative portrayal of Black life. Hughes, though, was unconcerned, saying that he wrote for the “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters” of New York, Washington, Chicago, and other Black hubs.

'The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ introduced a teenage Hughes to the literary world

While traveling to Mexico to visit his father, Hughes began scrawling “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as he crossed the Mississippi River, using the river as a metaphor for the Black experience. The poem was published in 1921 in the Crisis, an NAACP magazine edited by WEB DuBois, kickstarting Hughes’ literary career.

Read 'The New Negro,' the influential collection that helped define the Harlem Renaissance.

Alain Locke's 'The New Negro' anthology helped define the Harlem Renaissance

The 1925 collection of poetry, drama, short fiction, lyrics, and essays by Black writers was intended to document what Locke, a Harvard-trained philosopher and the first Black Rhodes Scholar, believed was a burgeoning Black consciousness that was "vibrant with a new psychology." The book is now considered one of the major impetuses for the Harlem Renaissance.

Langston Hughes wrote several children's books

Later in his career, the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” branched out into children’s literature, releasing a series of “First Book” titles (“The First Book of Rhythms,” “The First Book of Jazz”) as well as some that helped young Black children cope with racism, like 1969’s “Black Misery.”

Aaron Douglas' art defined the visual aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance

Douglas learned about Harlem's cultural scene while teaching high school in Kansas City and was eventually recruited to New York by Charles S. Johnson, the editor of the National Urban League's periodical. Soon, Douglas was illustrating periodicals and books affiliated with the movement. In 1934, the Works Progress Administration commissioned him to paint the "Aspects of Negro Life" murals. One of those murals, "Song of the Towers," pictured below, portrays Black life during the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes' poems brought blues and jazz to poetry

Poets like Walt Whitman and Claude McKay inspired Hughes, but he was also enamored with blues and jazz music. The styles informed the way he structured his verses, with Hughes employing repetition and rhythm in ways similar to the standard 12-bar blues form and playing with meter in a way that recalled the improvisation of jazz.

Langston Hughes poems inspired Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream'

In 1959, King wrote to Hughes, saying, "I can no longer count the number of times and places … in which I have read your poems." Scholars believe that Hughes' words—particularly his poems "Harlem" and "I Dream a World"—inspired King's most famous speech, "I Have a Dream."

Browse a collection of Harlem Renaissance poetry

This guide from the Poetry Foundation walks you through the movement's major poems, including works by writers like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Anne Spencer, James Weldon Johnson, and more. Helpfully, it's organized them into four major eras, allowing you to analyze the movement's steady evolution.

Writer James Baldwin once criticized Langston Hughes for squandering his talent

In 1959, Baldwin, the author of renowned works like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” reviewed Hughes’ “Selected Poems” for the New York Times. Baldwin panned the book, writing, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Read a Langston Hughes poem on 'Jazz as Communication'

The essay, delivered in 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival, offers a poetic take on defining jazz, suggesting that it is the root of both literature and music. “Jazz is a great big sea,” he says. “It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.”

Langston Hughes scholars have debated the writer’s sexuality

After his death, Hughes scholars discovered unpublished poems that some believe are addressed to a male lover. Hughes’ primary biographer has argued that he was likely asexual. Hughes never married or publicly commented on his sexual orientation.

Hughes’ ‘Harlem’ inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun’

Hughes' 11-line poem from “Montage of a Dream Deferred” is one of the most recognizable verses in American literature. Part of that is due to its legacy as the inspiration for the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first show written by a Black woman to appear on Broadway.

A guide to the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a multidisciplinary arts movement that included literature, music, dance, film, theater, photography, visual art, political activism, and more. This primer includes some of its most influential artists, including Oscar Micheaux, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Fats Waller, WEB DuBois, and more, and allows you to explore their lives and major works.

Langston Hughes solicited ghost stories from his readers

Hughes had a column in the Chicago Defender newspaper for two decades. In 1951, he asked readers to send him their ghost stories, promising that he'd reward them with autographed copies of his books. He spent the next several months dedicating the column to the stories he received.

Read the first (and only) issue of the magazine started by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others

"Fire!!" was founded in New York in 1926 by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and several other artists involved in the Harlem Renaissance. The publication was intended to flout the respectability of the middle-class Black tradition and instead engage with sometimes controversial ideas in a contemporary vernacular. The magazine's offices were, ironically, burned to the ground shortly after the first issue.

Langston Hughes' 'I, Too' replies to Walt Whitman

Hughes was a fan of Whitman and used one of the Good Gray Poet's most famous poems, "I Hear America Singing," as the basis for his 1926 poem "I, Too." Hughes' work is both a response and a pointed commentary about the unequal treatment of Black Americans.

Watch Langston Hughes perform with a jazz quintet

In 1958, Hughes performed with a jazz group on a Vancouver television show before appearing at the University of British Columbia. Hughes reads "Hey!" from his 1927 collection "Fine Clothes to the Jew" before performing 1925's "The Weary Blues."

Jazz was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance

The Great Migration transformed New York City's Harlem neighborhood into the epicenter of Black American art, with artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith regularly performing. The music not only provided the backbeat to the cultural scene—it often influenced it, with Harlem Renaissance poets, in particular, inspired by jazz's approach to rhythm and improvisation.

Hughes' 'Black Nativity' reworked the Christmas story through jazz improvisation

Although he’s primarily known as a poet, Langston Hughes was also a popular playwright. One of his most inventive works is the 1961 stage show “Black Nativity,” which told the story of Christ’s birth with an all-Black cast. Hughes’ original script encourages improvisation, calling on his love of jazz, and includes 27 songs.

Hughes once taught creative writing to junior high and high school students

In 1949, Hughes accepted an eight-week contract at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to teach creative work, along with seminars on jazz and the “negro theme” in American poetry. He enjoyed his time at the school, but never returned to the classroom, noting that the early mornings and teaching load left little time for his writing.

Langston Hughes performed with Muddy Waters at the Newport Jazz Fest

Hughes became involved with the Rhode Island music festival in 1956, sensing an opportunity to introduce the predominantly white audience to Black culture. In 1960, he helped book Muddy Waters for a blues session that featured the music alongside Hughes' poetic explanation of its history. The final song of the set, "Goodbye Newport Blues," found Waters' pianist singing lyrics Hughes had written earlier that day.

The Black cultural renaissance happened in places other than Harlem

Although the Harlem Renaissance is often cited as the singular Black arts movement of the early 20th century, similar cultural movements were occurring concurrently in other American cities. Places like Kansas City, Washington, DC, and Roanoke, Virginia, also had innovative Black cultural scenes.

How a Harlem Renaissance poet teamed up with a Wright brother

Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential poets from the Harlem Renaissance, a loose collection of Black artists who redefined American literature in the early 20th century. He was also an entrepreneur. He founded a short-lived newspaper, the Dayton Tattler, alongside Orville Wright, one of the famous Wright Brothers who pioneered aviation. This article explores how their friendship defied the societal norms of the time and led to a pioneering publication.

The NAACP encouraged and accommodated the early Harlem Renaissance

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization better known as the NAACP, recognized the disenchantment Black soldiers who served in World War I experienced when returning home to a segregated country and began advancing, and, in many ways, funding a "New Negro Movement," which would lead to the Harlem Renaissance.

Novelist Jean Toomer was uncomfortable with the term 'Negro writer'

Toomer's modernist novel "Cane" is, among critics, one of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer, however, was uncomfortable with his work being labeled as "Negro," including in Alain Locke's movement-defining collection "The New Negro." He found the title both reductive and inaccurate: He was mixed-race, telling writer Claude McKay that he was "French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish and Indian," and preferred to be considered "American."

The Great Migration helped transform Harlem into the epicenter of Black culture

Starting in 1910, millions of Black Americans moved from the South to escape segregation, violence, and dismal work opportunities. They moved to urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West. Chief among them was Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, which became an especially desirable location for Black people around 1910.

Analyzing Billie Holiday's impact on American poetry

Although Holiday is sometimes associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the Black cultural movement of the 1920s and '30s, scholar Whit Frazier Peterson argues that her real impact in poetry was on the Black Arts Movement, the more radical Black literary movement of the '60s and '70s that featured writers like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.

Hughes testified before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations

In 1953, the writer was interrogated by the Subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, about communism and its impact on his work. Cohn quoted lines from poems like “Goodbye, Christ” and “Ballads of Lenin,” but Hughes denied that he was a communist, explaining that poetry should not be taken literally. “That is a poem,” he told Cohn. “One can not state one believes every word of a poem.”

Hughes recorded an album with jazz legend Charles Mingus

1958’s “The Weary Blues” features Hughes reciting poems over jazz. The back half of the album is accompanied by bassist Charles Mingus and his ensemble, just a year before Mingus would release his landmark record “Mingus Ah Um.”

Rudolph Fisher was an incisive writer—and a practicing physician

Fisher was one of the luminaries Langston Hughes cited in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and was known as an impressive polymath, writing stories, acting in plays, and practicing medicine. In this deep dive, science writer Harriet A. Washington explores why he's often neglected in modern narratives about the Harlem Renaissance.

Paul Robeson was the Harlem Renaissance's chief renaissance man

Robeson played many roles throughout his life: He was an All-American football player who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, earned a law degree while playing in the NFL, starred in numerous films and Broadway shows, and became an outspoken advocate for labor and civil rights. His vocal criticism of US involvement in the Korean War led to his passport being voided and a protracted struggle with the US government.

Some Harlem Renaissance figures criticized Zora Neale Hurston's most famous novel when it was released

Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is now considered one of the masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, though some in the movement criticized it when it was released in 1937. Both Alain Locke and the writer Richard Wright felt that Hurston's novel lacked depth. Wright was particularly harsh, writing that "her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy."

Hughes wrote numerous short stories about a character named 'Simple'

Jesse B. Semple, known as “Simple,” was a recurring character in Hughes’ long-running column in the Chicago Defender newspaper. Hughes had conversations with the fictional Simple, who’d offer humorous and subtly profound observations about contemporary life, especially as it related to race, allowing Hughes to present pointed commentaries without coming across as preachy.

Walt Whitman helped define the voice and spirit of American literature

The 19th-century poet is considered one of the most important voices in the American canon. His collection “Leaves of Grass,” in particular, is regarded as a foundational text and is widely taught in American high schools and colleges.

'Lift Every Voice and Sing' was written to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday, but would go on to become the 'Black national anthem' and a Juneteenth tradition.

Duke Ellington's 'Harlem' takes listeners on a stroll through the neighborhood

"Sir Duke" was one of the Harlem Renaissance's major musicians, recording several songs that would become jazz standards. 1950's "Harlem" is an ode to the neighborhood, alternating styles (including a Latin groove and a New Orleans funeral dirge) to pay homage to the diverse cultures that populate it.

Whitman revolutionized American poetry

Whitman was a groundbreaking force in American literature, legitimizing the national idiom, capturing the spirit of the evolving country, and inspiring younger generations of writers for centuries to follow.

Explore a map of the Harlem Renaissance's nightclubs

Many of the Harlem Renaissance's greatest performances happened after hours, in one of the neighborhood's many nightclubs. This 1932 map, illustrated by Elmer Simms Campbell, highlights key hotspots, with insider tips on when to arrive, who to see, and how to fit in.

Many consider Twain 'the father of American literature'

In "Green Hills of Africa," Ernest Hemingway declared that all modern American literature sprang from Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." That's a sentiment shared by many scholars, who assert that Twain's book changed American fiction by challenging the country's racist history and incorporating a more realistic vernacular.

A 1981 review helped propel Basquiat into superstardom

“The Radiant Child,” featured in Artform in December 1981, presented Jean-Michel Basquiat (and, to a lesser degree, Keith Haring) as the genius of the post-graffiti art movement. The critic, Rene Ricard, wrote that, “[o]ne or two words on a Jean-Michel contain the entire history of graffiti.”

Jazz provided a soundtrack for the Civil Rights Movement

Songs like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," which portrayed the grim brutality of lynching, and John Coltrane's "Alabama," which was modeled on the rhythm of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., were the backbeat of the movement.

Hughes lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s

Hughes grew interested in the Soviet Union and radical politics in the early 1930s after the Communist Party of the United States defended the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers wrongly accused and convicted of raping two white women. In 1932, he lived there while working on a film that ultimately fizzled out, and returned home. In 1937, he planned to lead a tour of the country, as advertised below, but canceled it when a newspaper offered him a position reporting from the Spanish Civil War.

Basquiat's art was text heavy

Like his graffiti, Basquiat’s drawings and paintings often featured words and phrases among images. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson said, “[i]t’s as if he were dripping letters.” Below is 1983’s Horn Players, which includes portraits of jazz greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, along with words Basquiat associated with them.

Allen Ginsberg debuted his poem 'Howl' at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955, kicking off the nationwide interest in the Beat Generation.

Hughes reported on Black Americans volunteering in the Spanish Civil War

In 1937, the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him to cover the Black soldiers who’d left the US to fight in the International Brigades cooperating with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Hughes’ dispatches mainly focused on the racially integrated military companies, something that was prohibited in the US.

Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Declaration to demand equality

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the language and ideals of the Declaration of Independence to frame the Civil Rights Movement as a continuation of the nation’s founding promises.

'Shuffle Along,' a 1921 Broadway musical, brought jazz to American musical theater and helped pave the way for Black culture in the 20th century.

Augusta Savage's masterpiece was destroyed after a limited exhibition

"Life Every Voice and Sing," sometimes called "The Harp," debuted at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Based on the James Weldon Johnson poem (and eventual unofficial Black national anthem) of the same name, the massive, 16-foot-tall sculpture depicted a kneeling Black man holding a bar of music in front of 12 chorus singers. After the fair ended in 1940, Savage was unable to pay to preserve it, so it was destroyed.