Langston Hughes was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and moved to Cleveland at the age of fourteen. Several years later, he spent one year in Mexico before attending Columbia University in New York. For a few years after that, he roamed the world as a seaman, visiting ports around the world and writing some poetry. He returned to the United States and attended Lincoln University, where he won the Witter Bynner Prize for undergraduate poetry. After graduating in 1928, he traveled to Spain and to Russia with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His novels include Not Without Laughter (1930) and The Big Sea (1940). He wrote an autobiography in 1956 and also published several collections of poetry. The collections include The Weary Blues (1926), The Dream Keeper (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), One Way Ticket (1947), and Selected Poems (1959). A man of many talents, Hughes was also a lyricist, a librettist, and a journalist.

As an older man in the 1960s, he spent much of his time collecting poems from Africa and from African-Americans to popularize Black writers. Hughes is one of the most accomplished writers in American literary history, and he is seen as one of the artistic leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, the period when a neighborhood that was predominantly Black produced a flood of great literature, music, and other art forms depicting daily city life for African-Americans.