The Langston Hughes Effect

The Langston Hughes Affect

Langston Hughes was deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," a fitting title which the man who fueled the Harlem Renaissance deserved. But what if looking at Hughes within the narrow confines of the perspective that he was a "black poet" does not fully give him credit or fully explain his works? What if one actually stereotypes Hughes and his works by these over-general definitions that causes readers to look at his poetry expecting to see "blackness”? There are those factual events in Hughes' life, which are proven in documentation, records and testimony, but there are also other phenomenons (such as Hughes multiracial ancestry) that may have had some influence on him and his works as a young man. My aim for this paper is to examine the biographical background of Langston Hughes, how this affected his works and how his works have affected others.

Hughes' racial identity was formed from both a myriad of influences that accumulated over his life and also by the shadows of events that happened before his birth. Hughes' young life was segmented into distinctly different times with distinctly different influence. The relative he lived with and what city, state, or country he was residing in all seemed to be constantly changing and constantly dividing up his life from childhood through young adulthood. Consequently, events in each segment of Hughes' life contributed to his ever evolving self-identity. From a young age, Hughes' was aware that he had a multicultural background, and this realization undoubtedly played a major role in forming his self-identity. Hughes inherited his mother's Indian, French, and African ancestry, and in his young years, Hughes was greatly influence by this side of his family. Similarly, Hughes' father's linage was multicultural African and European. Two of Hughes' paternal great-grandfathers were white; one was a Jewish slave trader and the other was a Georgian distiller. Due in part to this ancestry,...