![]() Hughes’s prolific literary career was launched in 1926 with a volume of jazz poems called The Weary Blues, written for performance with musical accompaniment in the famous Harlem clubs of the era. ![]() He would receive patronage from the formidable but controlling Charlotte Mason, make voyages of self-discovery to Africa and Europe, and return to the United States with a freer, more confident vision of his own identity as an African-American, an artist, a leftist (he would later spend some time in Russia and answer for it during the McCarthy hearings), and a homosexual. For the remainder of the decade he would associate with all her prominent figures–Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and Carl Van Vechten. When funds for college dried up, Hughes moved to Harlem at the height of its golden era. There, with some money sent by his father, he enrolled in Columbia University, wrote his first verse, and began to publish in The Crisis, the historic magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., founded by W.E.B. Eventually the young man arrived in New York City in 1921. ![]() Langston Hughes’s childhood was marked by poverty, the separation of his parents (his father emigrated to Mexico, where Hughes would later visit), a matriarchal, church-going education, and a nomadic series of moves. ![]()
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