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Study Guide
Langston Hughes Biography
In 1920, shortly after graduating from high school, a young African-American man named Langston Hughes traveled by train to Mexico to visit his estranged father. The elder Hughes had departed the United States some years before, alienated by his dislike of American racism and of black American culture at the time. His father's distaste for their people baffled Langston Hughes because, as he wrote later, "I was a N****, and I liked N****es very much."blank">"The N**** Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes did not write to please any critic, white or black. He wrote to capture the beauty and pain he saw in and around him. He made us look at race—and ourselves—differently.