Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright and columnist and a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Raised largely in Lawrence, Kansas, and schooled in Cleveland, he first won notice in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, which printed The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921) and Mother to Son (1922). His books include The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930) and The Big Sea (1940), and he drew on blues, jazz and church music for the sound of his verse.
1922; collected 1926 · Early 20th Century · Poetry
Mother to Son is a twenty-line poem by Langston Hughes, first printed in The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, in December 1922, and collected four years later in Hughes's first book, The Weary Blues (1926). It is a dramatic monologue: the whole poem is spoken by a mother to her son, in her own voice and in the speech of a working Black woman of the time.
Dreams is an eight-line poem by Langston Hughes, first printed in May 1923 in The World Tomorrow, a Christian pacifist monthly published in New York, on a page that also carried his poem Our Land. Hughes was twenty-one.