Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was a popular American novelist, poet, and playwright, who greatly contributed to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s with his African-American themes (“Langston Hughes Biography”). The most fundamental author’s poems are “Dreams”, “As I Grew Older”, “Mother to Sun”, “April Rain Song”, “I, Too”, “Cross”, “Democracy”, and etc. In addition to a huge number of beloved poetic works, Hughes created eleven plays and prose compositions, containing the famous “Simple” books: