Langston Hughes was born James Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents were Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes. After his parents' divorce, Hughes was raised by his grandmother, Mary Leary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas until he was twelve years old. When he was a young child, Langston Hughes fell in love with books when his mother took him to a library. Not long after this, inspired by the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Laurence Dunbar, Hughes began writing. In July 1920, while riding in a train crossing the Mississippi River to St. Louis, he wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers. This poem talks about the endurance of human spirituality from the time of ancient Egypt to the nineteenth and twentie
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