A Brief Look At Langston Hughes

Before I explain my take on what "identity" means in Langston Hughes works, a man who happened to be one of the most recognizable names in African- American literature, I briefly would like to mention about him to help elucidate his background, and his style of writing.

Langston Hughes was born in the early 1900s, in a deeply segregated place call joplin, Missouri - once a southern confederate state. After moving around many states with his parents (since they couldn't land a job), he decided to to join the military - which gave him the opportunity to travel to West Africa and Europe. After temporary stay in Europe, Hughes joined the black expatriate community. Upon returning to the state, Hughes went back to school to complete his education
Based on his life experience, Hughes contributed to the formation of working- class literature. His identity, as a black man in the 1920s, a son of a Negro, made his journey of speaking for the working-class and a theme for much of Hughes’s work easier. After all, that was central to the black experience in America at that time. The racial inequality automatically locked most blacks into a working-class existence. Most were not given the education or the opportunities to pursue more professional careers. Many times, they were barred from even unskilled labor because of their race. As I mentioned above, many blacks in the 1920s, like Hughes’s own family, moved from place to place seeking for employment. Black people worked dead-end jobs, and Hughes valued this lifestyle. He valued the people and experiences involved with it because he felt that it was representative of African Americans - a representative of himself and his ancestors. As workers and as members of the working-class culture, Hughes believed blacks could maintain their individual cultural identity. They would be free to have their own beliefs and customs, independent from the authoritarian way of life they were subjected in that