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50 free Langston Hughes trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Langston Hughes trivia covers the poet who gave the Harlem Renaissance its voice and, decades later, gave A Raisin in the Sun its title. Born in Joplin, Missouri and raised largely by a grandmother whose first husband died in John Brown's raid, he wrote his signature poem on a train to Mexico at 17, was 'discovered' as a busboy by Vachel Lindsay, dropped out of Columbia, graduated from Lincoln University, and lived most of the rest of his life in Harlem. This quiz follows the whole career: The Crisis and The Weary Blues, the manifesto essay in The Nation, the road trip with Zora Neale Hurston and the play that ended their friendship, the novel that won the Harmon Gold Medal, the Soviet film that never got made, reporting from the Spanish Civil War, twenty years of Chicago Defender columns and the everyman Jesse B. Semple, the McCarthy hearing, and the honours that followed, from the Spingarn Medal to a postage stamp and a floor medallion in the Schomburg Center. Easy questions suit anyone who has read 'Harlem' in school; the expert tier is for people who know their Bontemps from their Van Vechten. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Hughes and his major works, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Missouri city was Langston Hughes born in 1901?
Joplin
He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, and claimed in his autobiography to have been born in 1902.
Q 02Hughes is best known as a leader of which cultural movement?
The Harlem Renaissance
He was also an early innovator of jazz poetry, setting verse to the rhythms of blues and bebop.
Q 03Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' was first published in 1921 in which NAACP magazine?
The Crisis
It was the NAACP's official magazine, and it published both his first and his last poems.
Q 04How old was Hughes when he wrote 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'?
17
He wrote it while crossing the Mississippi on a train to visit his father in Mexico.
Q 05Which four rivers does 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' name, in a progression from Eden to modern America?
Euphrates, Congo, Nile, Mississippi
The 'muddy bosom' turning golden at sunset gives the poem its note of hope.
Q 06Which literary editor brought Hughes's first poem to W. E. B. Du Bois?
Jessie Fauset
She later reviewed The Weary Blues and posed with Hughes and Hurston at Booker T. Washington's grave in Tuskegee.
Q 07What was the title of Hughes's first poetry collection, published in 1926?
The Weary Blues
The title poem, set in a bar on Lenox Avenue, had already won Opportunity magazine's prize for best poem of the year.
Q 08Hughes's poem about a Lenox Avenue bar pianist first ran in which magazine, whose prize it won?
Opportunity
Opportunity was the Urban League's magazine; the poem describes a piano player in a Harlem bar.
Q 09Which university did Hughes attend in 1921 before dropping out?
Columbia
His father had agreed to pay only if he studied engineering; he was denied a campus room because he was Black.
Q 10From which historically Black college in Pennsylvania did Hughes eventually graduate in 1929?
Lincoln
It is in Chester County, Pennsylvania; Lincoln later gave him an honorary doctorate in 1943.
Q 11Which poet 'discovered' Hughes in 1925 while Hughes was working as a busboy at a Washington hotel?
Vachel Lindsay
Hughes slipped him some poems at the Wardman Park Hotel and Lindsay publicised his find.
Q 12Langston Hughes worked as personal assistant to which historian, founder of Black History Week?
Carter G. Woodson
He quit because the work left too little time for writing.
Q 13On which ship did Hughes serve as a crewman in 1923, sailing to West Africa and Europe?
S.S. Malone
He jumped ship in Europe for a stay in Paris, where he had a romance with a Gold Coast student named Anne Marie Coussey.
Q 21Hughes's first short-story collection, published in 1934, was titled what?
The Ways of White Folks
He finished it in a Carmel-by-the-Sea cottage provided by his patron Noel Sullivan.
Q 22Why did Hughes travel to the Soviet Union in 1932?
To work on a film about Black life in America
The film was abandoned without explanation, and he stayed on to travel through Central Asia, where he befriended Arthur Koestler.
Q 23Which Hungarian-born writer, then a Communist, did Hughes befriend in Turkmenistan?
Arthur Koestler
Q 14Hughes's 1926 essay regarded as the manifesto of the younger Black artists of the 1920s was titled what?
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Published in The Nation, it declared: 'We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.'
Q 15What was the short-lived 1926 magazine Hughes co-founded with Hurston, Thurman and Nugent called?
Fire!!
Its full title was Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists; Claude McKay was the one member of the circle not involved.
Q 16Where did Hughes first meet Zora Neale Hurston, on 23 July 1927?
A passenger terminal in Mobile, Alabama
Because she owned a car, the two drove through the South together collecting folk songs.
Q 17Which play, co-written by Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in 1930, ended the two friends' relationship?
Mule Bone
It was not staged until 1991, when the Lincoln Center Theater produced it in New York.
Q 18Hughes's 1930 debut novel, Not Without Laughter, won which award?
The Harmon Gold Medal for literature
Its protagonist, a boy named Sandy, grows up in a small Kansas town between 1912 and 1918.
Q 19What is the name of the boy at the centre of Not Without Laughter?
Sandy
Hughes said the semi-autobiographical novel drew on his own Kansas childhood.
Q 20Which wealthy white patron supported Langston Hughes in the late 1920s until they fell out?
Charlotte Osgood Mason
He hinted at the break in his 1939 poem 'Poet to Patron'.
Koestler later wrote Darkness at Noon; Hughes went on from the USSR to China, Japan and Korea.
Q 24For which newspaper did Hughes go to Spain as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War in 1937?
The Baltimore Afro-American
He broadcast live from Madrid, and a Spanish magazine bid him farewell as 'el gran poeta de raza negra'.
Q 25Which award did Hughes receive in 1935 that funded travel to Spain and Russia?
A Guggenheim Fellowship
It funded his travels to Spain and Russia; a Rosenwald Fund fellowship followed in 1941.
Q 26For which Black newspaper did Hughes write a weekly column for twenty years from 1942?
The Chicago Defender
The column introduced the everyman character Jesse B. Semple.
Q 27What was the name of the Harlem everyman character Hughes began writing about in 1943?
Jesse B. Semple
Universally called 'Simple', he offered musings on the issues of the day, and later starred in the musical Simply Heavenly.
Q 28Hughes's poem 'Harlem' opens with what question?
What happens to a dream deferred?
The eleven-line poem answers with images including a raisin drying in the sun and a heavy sagging load.
Q 29Which 1959 play took its title from a line in Hughes's poem 'Harlem'?
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry's play was the first by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway.
Q 30'Harlem' was published in 1951 as part of which book-length poem sequence?
Montage of a Dream Deferred
The suite follows a 24-hour period in Harlem in a bebop-inflected style.