Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His parents divorced, and he grew up with his mother and grandmother, moving frequently around the South and Midwest. Hughes first went to New York at age nineteen in order to attend Columbia University. He soon dropped out of college, but stayed in New York where he met the group of writers and intellectuals with whom he was to socialize and collaborate over the next decade. Together they forged the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. When Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926, he was immediately recognized as a significant literary talent. That year he enrolled at Lincoln University, sponsored by a wealthy white patron, Mrs. Osgood Mason, a woman to whom Hughes referred as "godmother." With her pressure and encouragement, Hughes continued to write as he earned his degree. But in...