Negative Influences On Langston Hughes's Life

Langston Hughes Langston Hughes experienced everything an African American in the early 1900s could and then some. I would call his life unique. Hughes experienced the realities of not having a dollar in his pocket, and the advantages of the high life with money not being an issue. He saw both sides of American life but what made him famous was a product of the lower points in his life and the experiences given to him by a racist society. Hughes was raised in Kansas, a state that was not very friendly to black people, but then again what state truly was. Hughes was fortunate enough to be enrolled in a white school thanks to his mother’s steadfast resolve. His mother and father were separated because of his father's love of money. A

It was here, at the age of 14, that Langston Hughes began to write poems. When he was 17 his father invited him to live in Mexico with him.

His father was a black man but unlike Langston Hughes, James Hughes is not proud of his race. In fact, he hates the fact that he is a black man. Langston Hughes’s father probably has the biggest negative impact on his life. His father values money over everything including his employees and more importantly his family. Despite the inconvenience that is his father Hughes had a good time as a teacher in Mexico. He was much more welcome to the various communities of Mexico than the white communities of America where he was raised.

When he was twenty a new chapter of his life began. He moved to Harlem but didn’t stay long. He got a job as a ship's crewman and sailed to Africa. When he meets the African people, they do not accept him as a black man. To them, he was as black as a white man, and he fits in just as well. Hughes writes that he wishes that he was fully black and that the word negro had a more pure meaning in

This is when the legend of Langston Hughes starts to solidify. At about this time the educated “great” African American population had gathered some respect among the rest of the white community. Helped along by the growing popularity of things like jazz music and other African American cultural inventions. African American art of all types had become a sort of fad among the general public in the 1920’s and this includes poetry. The 1920’s was a time of excess and people were looking for new things to indulge in. For all his success a poet Hughes was now getting resistance not so much from the white community as he was from his fellow African American artists. These artists, and really any educated black person who had gained a sliver of respect among the white population, hated lower class uneducated black men as much as James Hughes did. Langston Hughes wrote a lot about the everyday struggle of an average African American, and this is why the rest of the educated African American community had disdain for his art. This did not, however, stop his ascension to a top figure of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920’s, as his poems were very popular among much of the American population. Hughes continued to be a very popular poet and today he is one of the great artists of