Langston Hughes Publishes 'The Weary Blues'—First Black Poet at Knopf

Langston Hughes published 'The Weary Blues' with Alfred A. Knopf in 1926—his debut poetry collection and one of the defining texts of the Harlem Renaissance. The collection introduced Hughes's jazz-and-blues-inflected free verse and his unashamed embrace of Black working-class life, establishing a new direction for Black poetry that rejected the formal constraints of the Victorian tradition. Hughes became the most recognizable poet of the movement.