Relationships
Family
Hughes had a complex relationship with his parents. The conflict between becoming a writer and a normal working man created tension in his family.
His mom wasn't around much and his father lived in Mexico. You can see Langston's complicated relationship with his mother portrayed in his play " Soul Gone Home". In the play a man who died at a young age rises up out of his casket and begins to criticize his mother for the lack of care she gave him. She tries to explain to him she did the best she could possibly do. Even though Langston's mother was away a lot she would send him letters, but he never responded. Hughes didn't live with his mother until he was about 12 years old.
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He grew up living with his grandmother who raised him. Through the black American traditions and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride. Inspired by his grandmother Langston felt he had a duty to help his race. Hughes identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and glorified them in his work. In his autobiography "The Big Sea", he stated "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother". When his grandmother died in his early teens Langston moved and ended up in Ohio with his mother.
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Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father, whom he seldom saw as a child. He lived briefly with his father in Mexico in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his plan to attend Columbia University.
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Other Poets
In 1924 Langston met the writers Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten. He had long lon lasting influential relationships with them. Van Vechten introduced Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. While working as a busboy in 1925 Hughes gave his poems to a popular white poet Vachel Lindsay.
