Again from The Big Sea:įor a few weeks I also sold the Appeal to Reason for an old gentleman with a white beard, who said his paper was trying to make a better world. Odd jobs included the cleaning of the lobby and the toilets of the old hotel near his school and delivering the Lawrence paper. He was well cared for and enjoyed the next two years, becoming Class Poet of his seventh grade class. When Hughes was twelve his grandmother died, and he went to live with his grandmother's friend, Auntie Reed. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas (p.16). And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. He writes in his autobiography, The Big Sea: From the time he was seven to about the time he was twelve-approximately 1909-1914-Hughes lived in Lawrence with his grandmother. His mother was a native Kansan, the daughter of free blacks who had homesteaded near Lawrence in the 187's. Langston Hughes was born in 1902 (now 1901-because of 2019 research by Kansas poet Eric McHenry) in Joplin, Missouri.
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