Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, and columnist — the most widely read Black American writer of the 20th century and the central literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes's genius was to make a poetry of Black American urban life in the vernacular and rhythms that life actually used — blues stanzas, jazz cadences, the idioms of Harlem streets — at a moment when much Black letters was still straining for the respectability of high European forms.
His 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" was the manifesto: Black writers must claim their own material on their own terms, neither bleaching it for white approval nor performing it for white exoticism. The poems of The Weary Blues (1926), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) put the program into practice. "What happens to a dream deferred?" — the opening line of the last volume — became, through Lorraine Hansberry's play, a phrase the whole culture knew.
He was also a tireless prose writer: the Simple stories (Jesse B. Semple, his Harlem everyman, in weekly columns for the Chicago Defender), the novel Not Without Laughter (1930), children's books, anthologies, translations (including Lorca and Neruda). He travelled to the Soviet Union, Spain during the Civil War, and across Africa; his politics drew him into long quarrels with both the Communist left and the NAACP middle. His influence radiated outward — to Césaire and the négritude poets, to the next generation of Black American poets, to the world.