His writing career began the year after he graduated from high school with the 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, followed in 1926. Throughout his work, ...

Langston Hughes didn't spend much of his childhood in Missouri, but the poet's presence lingers. Hughes, one of our truest American compasses, entered the world on the first day of February 1901, born ...

“I have a dream.” You have heard the line. But what you may not know is that the poetry of Langston Hughes influenced Martin Luther King Jr.’s best-known speech, which he delivered during the 1963 ...