Langston Hughes

"I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't the people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too."

Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes was for several decades the most popular Black American writer in the U.S. He died on May 22, 1967, in New York City. His words still resonated with readers long after his death.

One of the most talented and prolific writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Langston Hughes enjoyed a long and successful...