Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He attended Columbia University from 1921 until 1922, then traveled extensively in South America and Europe before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1925. The next year Hughes published his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, to great acclaim. In 1929 he received a B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, but from 1928 until 1930 he lived in New York City and was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to poetry, he wrote fiction, drama, screenplays, essays, and autobiography. Because of his journalistic work in support of the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and his sympathies for the American Communists, in 1953 he was called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee on subversive activities, and for many years following he worked to restore his reputation. Always concerned “largely … with the depicting of Negro life in America,” Hughes – like Whitman, Sandburg, and Dunbar – populated his poems with urban figures, such as busboys, elevator operators, cabaret singers, and streetwalkers. He documented their troubles in social-protest poems, drawing his meters and moods from street language, jazz, and the blues. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
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