Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and lived for most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his maternal grandmother, whose first husband had been one of the African Americans killed in John Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Hughes was thirteen when she died, at which time he went to live with his mother. He graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and then spent more than a year with his father in Mexico. It was there that he wrote the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which would later gain him recognition as a writer.

Hughes studied for a year at Columbia University, leaving in 1920. For the next several years, he traveled, taking whatever jobs he found. During this peripatetic period, he continued to write. His work began to be published in important African-American periodicals like Opportunity and The Crisis. He accepted a scholarship from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and graduated in 1929. While there, he wrote his first novel, Not without Laughter (1930). Political activism in the 1930s resulted in his later being called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 and listed as a security risk by the FBI until 1959.

Hughes was a prolific, versatile writer and is especially well known for his famous fictional character Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple." Awards and honors recognizing his work include Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships and a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His works include The Weary Blues (1926), The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (essay, 1926), The Ways of White Folks (stories, 1934), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), First Book of Negroes (anthology, 1952), First Book of Jazz (anthology, 1955), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), First Book of Negro Folklore (anthology, 1958).