At Lincoln, he started to grow a close network of loving friends. Upon returning home to the United States, Hughes was awarded a scholarship to study at Lincoln College. He published two books of poetry, but neither was a commercial success. His poetry took on the unique textures and tones of jazz music, inspiring him to write poems that are now considered the first works of “jazz poetry.” Briefly, in Paris, Hughes believed that racism was on its way out of society. While in Paris, he developed a deeper interest in jazz and blues music, which had made its way across the Atlantic from Charleston. Paris brought him into contact with many artists from other uniquely difficult backgrounds.
He moved to Europe, settling in Paris, where he survived by finding low-income housing. He struggled to find continuous employment because he was black. Hughes enrolled in college but dropped out soon after to work on various shipping vessels that sailed the Atlantic between America, Africa, and Europe. This experience was difficult for Hughes, who realized that his father had little interest in knowing him as a person. When Hughes was seventeen, his father took him to stay on his estate in Mexico. His love of language drove him to excel in school and served as a refuge from his difficult life. He developed an early interest in writing as a way of expressing his complex feelings of frustration, ambivalence, and hope, favoring poetry because of its great flexibility. At times, when his mother could not fully support him, he lived with his grandmother and family friends. Early on, the deeply empathetic Hughes saw the injustices of American society through his mother’s eyes. Hughes grew up in poverty his mother had constant difficulty finding a well-paying job because she was black.
He grew up mainly with his mother, who raised him by herself after Hughes’ father abandoned the family to seek a fortune in Mexico. Hughes begins with his memories of childhood. The autobiography is considered an important account of the various obstacles African-American creatives faced in the early twentieth-century United States. Hughes also comments on the systemic racial injustice he sees around him in the United States.
As he evolved as a writer and thinker, Hughes worked through the psychological burden of past abuse inflicted by his father, torn between empathizing with his father’s own sources of trauma and the damage it did to him. With few opportunities to make money, Hughes learned to be highly resourceful, taking up odd jobs in nightclubs and taking small writing jobs to get by. Published in 1940, when Hughes was 38, the volume retraces his early childhood, adolescence, and initial years trying to succeed as a writer and artist of minority status in New York and Paris. Big Sea is the first book in the autobiographical series of African-American poet Langston Hughes.
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