He made use of the ways of the folk: with boldness and love, he captured the essence of their idiom, the power of their spiritual and secular music, and the tragicomic nature of their lives.
Hughes's life experience strongly influenced his style of writing. While most critics have pointed to the melodrama in Hughes's work, others have observed that black life in America is melodramatic. Readers familiar with Hughes's own life, for instance, have remarked about the soap-opera quality of some of his experiences. A keen observer, Hughes saw many variations of the daily occurrences of his own life reflected in the lives of innumerable others. For example, when Simple complains about his inability to get a decent job even though he is willing to work, about landlords who charge high rent for substandard housing, and about racial discrimination by whites and color discrimination by blacks, he is talking about problems that Hughes himself had experienced and observed.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, whose incompatibilities and final separation disrupted their home environment, Hughes at an early age began the vagabond existence that lasted throughout his lifetime. During his first twelve years he was shuttled back and forth to more than half that many cities: Buffalo; Cleveland; Lawrence, Kansas; Mexico City; Topeka, Kansas; Kansas City; and Colorado Springs.
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