Hughes wrote for and about everyday Black Americans

Hughes' poems brought blues and jazz to poetry

Poets like Walt Whitman and Claude McKay inspired Hughes, but he was also enamored with blues and jazz music. The styles informed the way he structured his verses, with Hughes employing repetition and rhythm in ways similar to the standard 12-bar blues form and playing with meter in a way that recalled the improvisation of jazz.

Langston Hughes wrote a foundational text for the Harlem Renaissance

Although the 1920s artistic movement lacked formal leaders, Hughes' 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" established him as one of its figureheads. Hughes' piece argues that Black artists should not be ashamed of their race; instead, they should embrace it, while simultaneously pursuing their own individual artistic visions.

Hughes wrote numerous short stories about a character named 'Simple'

Jesse B. Semple, known as “Simple,” was a recurring character in Hughes’ long-running column in the Chicago Defender newspaper. Hughes had conversations with the fictional Simple, who’d offer humorous and subtly profound observations about contemporary life, especially as it related to race, allowing Hughes to present pointed commentaries without coming across as preachy.

Hughes once taught creative writing to junior high and high school students

In 1949, Hughes accepted an eight-week contract at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to teach creative work, along with seminars on jazz and the “negro theme” in American poetry. He enjoyed his time at the school, but never returned to the classroom, noting that the early mornings and teaching load left little time for his writing.

Writer James Baldwin once criticized Langston Hughes for squandering his talent

In 1959, Baldwin, the author of renowned works like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” reviewed Hughes’ “Selected Poems” for the New York Times. Baldwin panned the book, writing, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Langston Hughes wrote several children's books

Later in his career, the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” branched out into children’s literature, releasing a series of “First Book” titles (“The First Book of Rhythms,” “The First Book of Jazz”) as well as some that helped young Black children cope with racism, like 1969’s “Black Misery.”

'The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ introduced a teenage Hughes to the literary world

While traveling to Mexico to visit his father, Hughes began scrawling “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as he crossed the Mississippi River, using the river as a metaphor for the Black experience. The poem was published in 1921 in the Crisis, an NAACP magazine edited by WEB DuBois, kickstarting Hughes’ literary career.

Read Langston Hughes’ most famous poems

The writer is considered one of the most important voices in American verse, noted for his use of authentic vernacular, vivid imagery, and jazz-inspired rhythm in poems such as “Harlem,” “I, Too,” and “The Weary Blues.

Langston Hughes scholars have debated the writer’s sexuality

After his death, Hughes scholars discovered unpublished poems that some believe are addressed to a male lover. Hughes’ primary biographer has argued that he was likely asexual. Hughes never married or publicly commented on his sexual orientation.

Hughes reported on Black Americans volunteering in the Spanish Civil War

In 1937, the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him to cover the Black soldiers who’d left the US to fight in the International Brigades cooperating with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Hughes’ dispatches mainly focused on the racially integrated military companies, something that was prohibited in the US.

Hughes lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s

Hughes grew interested in the Soviet Union and radical politics in the early 1930s after the Communist Party of the United States defended the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers wrongly accused and convicted of raping two white women. In 1932, he lived there while working on a film that ultimately fizzled out, and returned home. In 1937, he planned to lead a tour of the country, as advertised below, but canceled it when a newspaper offered him a position reporting from the Spanish Civil War.

Langston Hughes solicited ghost stories from his readers

Hughes had a column in the Chicago Defender newspaper for two decades. In 1951, he asked readers to send him their ghost stories, promising that he'd reward them with autographed copies of his books. He spent the next several months dedicating the column to the stories he received.

Hughes testified before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations

In 1953, the writer was interrogated by the Subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, about communism and its impact on his work. Cohn quoted lines from poems like “Goodbye, Christ” and “Ballads of Lenin,” but Hughes denied that he was a communist, explaining that poetry should not be taken literally. “That is a poem,” he told Cohn. “One can not state one believes every word of a poem.”

Langston Hughes' 'I, Too' replies to Walt Whitman

Hughes was a fan of Whitman and used one of the Good Gray Poet's most famous poems, "I Hear America Singing," as the basis for his 1926 poem "I, Too." Hughes' work is both a response and a pointed commentary about the unequal treatment of Black Americans.

Hughes’ ‘Harlem’ inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun’

Hughes' 11-line poem from “Montage of a Dream Deferred” is one of the most recognizable verses in American literature. Part of that is due to its legacy as the inspiration for the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first show written by a Black woman to appear on Broadway.

Whitman's antislavery writing often focused on white Americans

The poet was openly opposed to slavery, though some of his writing focuses on abolition’s benefits for white people rather than for the lives of the enslaved.

Rudolph Fisher was an incisive writer—and a practicing physician

Fisher was one of the luminaries Langston Hughes cited in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and was known as an impressive polymath, writing stories, acting in plays, and practicing medicine. In this deep dive, science writer Harriet A. Washington explores why he's often neglected in modern narratives about the Harlem Renaissance.

Understanding Thoreau's critique of American work

John Kaag, a coauthor of "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living," explains how the writer is often mischaracterized as a layabout who avoided responsibilities. Kaag, though, notes that Thoreau was a jack-of-all-trades—working as a schoolteacher and a handyman, and even for his father's pencil-manufacturing company—who came to believe that relentless striving was getting in the way of authentic living.

In the '60s, Bob Dylan often trolled the media, mocking its focus on celebrity

This 1965 press conference, just before the release of the landmark "Bringing It All Back Home," illustrates how fed up he'd become, laughing at inane questions and offering snide responses. When asked if he thinks of himself more as a singer or as a poet, he responds, "I think of myself more as a song and dance man."

'A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.'

- Jackie Robinson, the first Black MLB player (1919-1972)

Ernest Hemingway’s worst boss

Before international fame and the Nobel Prize in Literature, Ernest Hemingway toiled under the harsh rule of the assistant managing editor at the Toronto Daily Star. Learn about the American writer’s difficult early career as a features writer with a job so demanding he had to miss the birth of his first son. However, thanks to that harsh boss, Hemingway asserted boundaries, left journalism, and began his legendary career writing fiction.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Rockwell left the Saturday Evening Post and began creating more politically charged work

Rockwell left the magazine in 1963 and joined Look magazine, where he began depicting a more complex America than he had at the Post. His work at Look dealt with racial segregation and violence, and often made unambiguous statements about real events.

Tom Wolfe wrote a humorous account of the birth of New Journalism

Wolfe explains the style came from journalists attempting to make fact-based reporting read like a novel, arguing that traditional reporting left readers “bored to tears.” Instead of emphasizing an objective point of view, Wolfe favored detailed descriptions that established complex characters, painted interesting scenes, and shared dialogue.

In the 1920s, country was often called 'hillbilly music'

The term was meant to describe the rural people who typically performed the Appalachian folk music. Though Black people were also making country music at the time, their records were categorized as “race music.”

Before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was a workaday songwriter

His job at Pickwick Records, a label that churned out budget records for department stores, was to crank out generic pop fare. One of those songs was 1964’s “The Ostrich,” a dance song in the style of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

During the French Revolution, a botanist's letter asking about "dear Rhus" (poison ivy) was intercepted, leading authorities to suspect he was conspiring with the Russians.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones in communities in West Africa have hampered Ebola responses.

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.