SOURCE: Sundquist, Eric J. “Who Was Langston Hughes?” Commentary 102, no. 6 (December 1996): 55-9.

In the following essay, Sundquist discusses the cultural influence of Langston Hughes as a result of his several decades of producing poetry, fiction, drama, autobiographical writings, and other works.

At the height of his fame, Langston Hughes (1902-67) was esteemed as “Shakespeare in Harlem,” a sobriquet he borrowed for the title of a 1942 volume of poems. By this point in his career, Hughes had already been credited with some of the finest work in the great flowering of African-American literature known as the Harlem Renaissance. Just as significantly, he had also emerged as one of the most acclaimed writers of the radical Left.

Hughes never did abandon the language of racial protest; a revealing measure of his influence may be found in famous works whose titles are themselves quotations from his poems, among them James Baldwin's...