Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and columnist from Joplin, Missouri, an early innovator of jazz poetry and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. His poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers appeared in The Crisis in 1921, and his first collection, The Weary Blues, in 1926. He also wrote plays, short stories, novels and nonfiction, and from 1943 published stories about Jesse B. Semple, an everyday black man in Harlem. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement grew, he wrote a weekly column for The Chicago Defender. He died in New York City in 1967 after surgery related to prostate cancer.