However, that is actually his last name; he was born as James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. As a child, his parents divorced and his father moved away. Around the age of thirteen, he moved to Lincoln, Illinois with his mother and her new husband before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. He began writing poetry in high school while living in Lincoln, he attended Lincoln High School. During his years at Columbia University in New York, he worked odd jobs such as assistant cook, laundryman, and busboy. Working at these jobs, he claimed that Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman were his writing influences. Langston Hughes was known for writing portraits of black life in America in the twenties and sixties. Kind of like the poems I read for this newspaper that sound a lot like an African American living in Harlem. I think his personal experience and the common experience of black America were not that different. He wanted to tell stories about his people in their current culture, including their suffering and their love of music, laughter and language itself. I have never read such poems from a great poet who bases his material on the world around him. He spread his message clearly across America, in an entertaining way, to more people than any other American poet has. Most poets would simply address the problem of