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Today we are featuring one of the icons of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the fathers of Black Literature, Langston Hughes. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and he was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen. He moved to Lincoln, Illinois with his mother and her husband for a spell, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Hughes began writing poetry as a teen, and after graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico with his father, followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked odd jobs and began to write in earnest. Hughes claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. and in 1926, after Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929 and in 1930