The Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay and Langston Hughes
...es, McKay developed an interest in Communism and visited Russia and then France. In 1934, McKay came back to the US and lived in Harlem. Later in life he converted to Catholicism. His viewpoints and achievements influenced many and gained the respect of many people. He died in 1948. His works of literature includes The Tropics in New York, Baptism, and If We Must Die. James Langston Hughes was born on February 1st 1902 in Joplin Missouri. Shortly after he was born his parents separated. His mother moved around searching for work, they moved to Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. When he was a child he lived with his grandmother for a time, when he was 13 he moved back with his mother and her new husband. After graduating from high school, he spent a year with his father in Mexico who had become a cattle rancher. After he left his fathers' ranch to return north Hughes wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers. In 1921, the poem appeared in the journal Crisis. In 1921,he also published his first play The Golden Piece. Soon after he entered the Columbia University in New York unfortunately he preferred the jazz and blues in Harlem. Hughes decided to travel the world, he went to West Africa, Paris and Italy. Later he returned to the US to write poems in his spare time which earned him a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1929 he received his bachelors degree. Throughout the rest of his life he wrote many poems, plays and prose including Montage of a Dream Deferred and The Ways of White Folks. III. The Mid-1940's Arna Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana but he was raised in California. In 1923, he graduated from Pacific Union College and then moved to New York City. During the 1920s, he was a well know author and won many prizes as well. In 1931, he moved to Alabama, there he was inspired to write Southern Mansion because of the house he and his family lived in. Throughout his career, he has had other great woks of literature including Alabama Tales, A black Man Talks of Reaping, and Drums at Dusk. Margaret Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She got interested in African-American heritage at a young age. She attended Northwestern University in Illinois. After she graduated, she moved to Chicago but she left to go to the University of Iowa. In 1942, she wrote For My People, which won her the Yale Younger Poets Series Awar...