He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.Īccording to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas.

Hughes was born Febru(although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes.

Deep poems about growing up