A is for April Rain Song: Langston Hughes

  James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902. Langston Hughes is referred to as the Poet Laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. He is known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Unlike other notable black poets of the time, Langston Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal middle-class experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the true stories of Black America in ways that reflected the actual culture, including both the struggle and the triumph. Hughes wrote what would be considered a manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, published…