I stay cool, and dig all jive, That's the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return.

As the work demands limited his time for writing Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. The following year Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University a historically black university in Chester County Pennsylvania. 1932
Let America Be America Again 1938
Shakespeare in Harlem Knopf 1942
Freedom's Plow 1943
Fields of Wonder Knopf 1947
One-Way Ticket 1949
Montage of a Dream Deferred Holt 1951
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes 1958
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz Hill & Wang 1961
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times 1967
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Knopf 1994


Novels and short story collections
Not Without Laughter.

Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue". James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1 1902 – May 22 1967) was an American poet social activist novelist playwright and columnist.