Claude McKay was born September 15, 1889, in Clarendon, Jamaica. His name is Festus Claudius ‘Claude’ McKay. His parents have eleven children and he was the youngest of them. At the age of ten, he started writing poetry. In 1912, he attended Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State Teachers College. McKay moved to Harlem, New York, which is when he published his first books of poetry. In 1919, he came out with his poem ‘If We Must Die’. McKay’s poem ‘Red Summer’ was created because white people were shocked when blacks started to fight back against them. This led them to go to different places across the United States. McKay became the voice of the Harlem Renaissance in 1922. Harcourt, Bruce, and Company published his book of poems. McKay was the first black writer to be published by this company. He published his first novel ‘Home of Harlem’ in 1928. McKay’s autobiography ‘A Long Way from Home’ was written in 1937. McKay became a United States citizen in 1940. In 1942, he converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization. He died on May 22, 1948, at the age of 58 from a heart attack in Chicago, Illinois.
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As for Langston Hughes, he was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri and his real name is James Mercer Langston Hughes. He is an American poet and novelist. Langston and his mother moved to Cleveland after the death of his grandmother. In 1920, he graduated from Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduation, he wrote ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. In 1922, he dropped out of Columbia University. He went to Paris in 1924 in search of freedom and that’s when he started writing poems. During his stay in Paris, he found a job as a busboy and dishwasher. This was the same year he met Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten, who were also writers, and they formed a lifelong friendship. In 1925, he won a poetry prize. In 1926, he received a scholarship to enter Lincoln University that is in Pennsylvania. Also, in 1926, Knopf published his book of poems, ‘The Weary Blues’. He also received an award from Wither Bynner Undergraduate. He published ‘The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain’. He launched a magazine called ‘Fire!!’. His second poetry, ‘Fine Clothes to the Jews’, was published in 1927. He founded theater companies in Harlem, and that took place in 1937. In 1940, he published his autobiography ‘The Big Sea’. Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967, at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 65 from prostate cancer. His ashes are buried under the floor in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Harlem.
Claude McKay and Langston Hughes both were known as stars in Harlem. They influenced other African American writers. In his writings, Hughes talked about the beauty of African American culture, while McKay talked about the violence that was going on. In the 1919-1933 Harlem Renaissance they became popular poets. They both were poets who expressed emotions about black people. They have impacted my life through their work because they were great poets and novelists. They made way for African American culture. They gave African Americans a voice to speak back without being punished for speaking their minds. They both died on the same day and the same month, and that was 19 years apart from each other.
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