in literature at Lincoln University and worked at the Association for the Study of Negro Life in Washington, D.C. To express his individuality, a first stand-alone title, The Weary Blues (1926), assimilated black music and verse. In 1926, Hughes completed the groundbreaking Afro-American manifesto "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." He asserted that blacks must free themselves from a pervasive self-loathing for being black and from the styles and topics indigenous to white literature. On a Southern tour, he won the admiration of playwright Eugene O'Neill and poet James Weldon Johnson but met with smug, eloquent racism at Vanderbilt University, where Allen Tate declined to meet the celebrated Harlemite. Knopf and encouraged the editors of Vanity Fair and American Mercury to publish a glittering new talent. Hughes gained the ear of critic Carl van Vechten, who passed him on to publisher Alfred A. By age 23, Hughes netted a poetry prize from Opportunity magazine for "The Weary Blues," a masterwork about a pianist he had heard at the Cotton Club. The next morning, the newspapers reported that Lindsay had discovered a prodigy among the kitchen help. While busing dishes at the Wardman Park Hotel, Hughes left a few sheets of verse for the perusal of a diner, poet Vachal Lindsay. Hughes returned to New York and published eleven poems in Locke's anthology, The New Negro (1925). After capturing dawn hours on the Rue Pigalle in "The Breath of a Rose," he welcomed the tutelage of Locke, who escorted him to the city's landmarks and the Piazza San Marco of Venice. In 1924, Hughes cooked and washed dishes at Le Grand Duc, a chi-chi cabaret in the fashionable Montmartre section of Paris. He reveled in the exotic fragrances and sights of the Canary Islands, Dakar, Timbuktu, and Lagos, source of his anti-European manifesto, "Liars." He became the only member of the Harlem Renaissance artists to sample the atmosphere of Nigeria and Angola. This was his first trip abroad, and he anchored his optimism on the support of Joel Spingarn and Jessie Fauset and letters from Countée Cullen and Alain Locke. Malone on a transatlantic haul to west Africa. Hughes left college after two semesters and worked as a truck farm laborer, waiter, and valet before accepting a berth as seaman aboard the S. On his return north in 1921, he published it in Crisis. On the dismal train ride to Mexico, he displayed his literary promise with "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which he wrote while crossing the Mississippi River near St. After graduation, he lived in Mexico for fifteen months with his father, from whom he wheedled tuition to Columbia University. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland. He served as class poet of his elementary school. When his parents divorced in 1913 and his mother married a white man, he lived in her ramshackle apartment in Lincoln, Illinois. He grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, on a literary diet of the Bible and Crisis, the NAACP magazine. Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes was an inveterate collector of bits of Afro-Americana gleaned from chance encounters, sonorous sermons, jingles and advertisements, and snatches of jazz tunes. He attempted most literary venues, including short and long fiction, songs, history, humor, journalism, travelogue, juvenile literature, stage comedy, and screenplay. The rare professional poet and playwright who earned a living from publication, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, he became America's first internationally known black writer. The master poet of the Harlem Renaissance and one of America's most translated authors, James Mercer Langston Hughes captured the blues stanza and the dialect music of mainstream black America.
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