In 1926, Hughes completed the groundbreaking Afro-American manifesto "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." He asserted that blacks must free themselves from a pervasive self-loathing for being black and from the styles and topics indigenous to white literature. To express his individuality, a first stand-alone title, The Weary Blues (1926), assimilated black music and verse. He completed a B.A. in literature at Lincoln University and worked at the Association for the Study of Negro Life in Washington, D.C. While living in Westfield, Pennsylvania, at the beginning of the Depression, he published a novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), a depiction of small-town life in the Midwest that earned enough royalties to free him from patrons.
In the spring of 1931, Hughes collaborated with folklorist Zora Neale Hurston on Mule Bone, a three-act folk comedy. After a quarrel over how to pay a typist, the duo ended their friendship. The play remained unperformed until its debut in February 1991 at New York's Lincoln Center.
As the Harlem Renaissance slowly fizzled, Hughes, influenced by the verse of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, absorbed the essence of Harlem street life and characterized the Negro's plight in America in Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Dear Lovely Death (1931). In addition, he wrote The Dream Keeper (1932) and Popo and Fifina (1932) for young readers and translated socially conscious verse by black poets from Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico. He wrote for New Masses, a Communist journal, and, in 1932, toured Russia, China, and Japan, a journey that brought FBI scrutiny during the paranoid McCarthy era. He collaborated with musician James Price Johnson on a stage work, De Organizer (1932), and crafted Scottsboro Limited (1932) for the stage, a propaganda piece that hammered out the message that the South still denied justice to blacks. In 1935, he composed "To Negro Writers," an essay demanding a world free of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and handouts.
