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Langston Hughes Biography (cont)
In 1924, Langston returned to Harlem after a stent in Paris at 15 Rue de Nollet. Hughes wrote frequently as his writing flourished starting the "Harlem Renaissance."
After his return to Washington D.C. in 1925, he spent more time in blues and jazz clubs stating "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...[these songs] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." After some time, Hughes worked with Dr. Carater G. Woodson, the editor of the Journal of Negro Life and History and founder of Black History Week in 1926.
Langston Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, where he would receive his B.A. in 1929 and was awarded an honorary Lit.D. in 1943 by his alma mater and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940.
Hughes, claiming much of his influence from Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, wrote a series of essays known as My Simple Minded Friend based on a conversation with a man in a Harlem bar. This character became known as Jess B. Simple in 1950 as Langston authored a series of books based on him.
In Langston Hughes' forty-some year career between 1926 and his death in 1967 he wrote sixteen books of poetry, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of editorials and documentary fiction, twenty plays, children's poetry, musical and operas, three autobiographies, over a dozen radio and television scripts and dozens of magazine articles.
James Langston Hughes died of cancer on May 22, 1967. His home in Harlem, New York at 20 East 127th Street was given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission while his block, East 127th Street, was renamed "Langston Hughes Place."
Langston Hughes was the great-great-grandson of Charles henry Langston, the brother of John Mercer Langston, the first Black American to hold public office in 1855.
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