In Haiti he started to think about making poetry pay, and during the next few years which took him from Port an Prince to Havana, through the south via New York to San Francisco, and then to Moscow, Tashkent, Tokyo, Shanghai, Carmel, California, Mexico City, Harlem, Cleveland, Madrid, and finally Paris, he got along. He knew pretty well by then that he wanted to be a writer, but it was not so easy for a Negro to get a living out of writing. In that time he was writing poems too, and a novel, Not Without Laughter, which earned him a $400 award, which was what he had in 1929 when he lost his patron and decided to go to Haiti for a while. He graduated in 1929, and had worked in a hat store, on a truck farm, in a flower shop, and as a doorman, second cook, waiter, beach-comber, bum, and seaman, on the way. So, when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing." Hughes had been a long time getting through college. When I was twenty-eight my personal crash came. "When I was twenty-seven," he begins, "the stock-market crash came. The book, which he calls an autobiographical journey, describes Hughes' travellings from 1930 to 1937. "Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again," Langston Hughes writes in I Wonder as I Wander.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |