Short answers, pulled from the story.
Langston Hughes was born on the 1st of February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, though Hughes himself claimed in his autobiography to have been born in 1902. He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston.
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was first published in 1921 in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. It became his signature poem and was later collected in his debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues, published in 1926.
The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American arts and culture centered in Harlem during the 1920s. Hughes was recognized as a leader of the movement, working alongside contemporaries including Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. He also wrote what served as their artistic statement, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation in 1926.
Hughes was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, in 1953. His poetry had appeared in the CPUSA newspaper and he had been involved in Communist-aligned causes, though he always denied being a Communist Party member. Following his testimony, he distanced himself from Communist-affiliated causes and excluded his radical socialist verse from his Selected Poems, published in 1959.
Hughes's ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram titled Rivers, which at its center carries the line "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," taken from his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."
Hughes met Zora Neale Hurston on the 23rd of July 1927 at a passenger terminal in Mobile, Alabama. Because Hurston owned a car, they traveled together through the South documenting folk songs and local customs. They also co-wrote the play Mule Bone together, though their collaboration eventually ended in dispute over the authorship of that work.