James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until the age of thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family finally settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, laundress and waiter, and traveled to Africa and Europe working as a sailor. In November 1924 he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his major influences, is particularly known for his insightful and colorful portraits of black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred". His life and work were extremely important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other important black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to distinguish between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their current culture, including their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself. Hughes and his contemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class. class, and the three considered the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, WEB Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain Locke, who they accused of going too far in embracing and assimilating Eurocentric values ​​and culture for social equality. Of primary conflict were the representations of "low-life", that is, the real life of blacks in the lower socio-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community.