Langston Hughes

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of the 1920s. , for most of his adult life the unofficial Poet Laureate of the race, accepted as his vocation "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." His personal credo, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," became the credo of a generation of Aframerican poets. Hughes' poetry drew from traditional sources and individual voices; his experiments in form reflect an attempt to capture the myriad colors known collectively as "black." His opus speaks not for Hughes the man, but for the race as a whole.Unlike other notable black poets of the period--Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen--Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people without personalizing them, so the reader could step in and draw his own conclusions. died in ...

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