Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, but his childhood was nomadic, his parents separated, his father moved to Mexico, and young Langston was raised largely by his grandmother in Kansas, a woman who had been married to one of the men who died with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. She taught him about struggle and survival, about dignity and defiance. At seventeen, crossing the Mississippi by train, he wrote his first major poem, meditating on the rivers his ancestors had known. At nineteen, his father paid his way to Mexico but mocked his literary ambitions; Hughes took a freighter to Africa instead, throwing his father's books into the sea as he left, keeping only Whitman.

Langston Hughes is best known as a artist. American poet of the Harlem Renaissance whose jazz-inflected verse voiced Black life, hope, and struggle.

Langston Hughes lived 1901-1967 CE, born in 1901 and died in 1967, during the modern period.

Yes, free. Anyone can ask Langston Hughes, and a first question needs no account. Every answer is a Simulation in character, grounded in Langston Hughes’s real life, work and era. A good first question is: "How do I write poetry that sounds like my own people talking?"