Langston Hughes is one of the prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of renewed African-American artistic, intellectual, and cultural production that took place in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. The movement is most closely associated with the neighborhood of Harlem in Manhattan, New York, an area with a majority Black populace that produced a number of notable artists across the disciplines. At the time, the phenomenon was known as the "New Negro Movement," taken from the title of The New Negro anthology edited by Alain Locke.
The Harlem Renaissance featured work from writers, musicians, philosophers, religious figures, and performers of all kinds. Notable literary figures include Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. The period also saw the rise of jazz and blues music, exemplified by the work of musicians and singers like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. Jazz music continued to soar in popularity, with many Black artists adopting its staples of improvisation and experimentation for their own work outside the genre of music. In contemporary art, writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin both credited the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz music specifically, with the inspiration for their own critically acclaimed work. One of Morrison's novels is even entitled Jazz.
