The Book of Negro Folklore by Langston Hughes

As the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote a weekly column from 1942 to 1962 for The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. His book-length poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred” was published in 1951. His first novel, “Not without Laughter,” was published in 1930 and won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes’s first work of poetry was the “The Weary Blues,” published in 1926.

He then spent a year at Columbia University in New York and went on to finish his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. They eventually relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where Langston graduated from high school. He was raised by his grandmother until he was 13, when he moved to Lincoln, Ill., to live with his mother and her husband. His parents divorced when he was a young child and his father moved to Mexico. While his life and work are most closely associated with New York City, he spent part of his childhood in central Illinois. Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, fiction writer and playwright whose African American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten/Carl Van Vechten Trust/ Beinecke Library, Yale

The Book of Negro Folklore by Langston Hughes