Obituary - sample

Langston Hughes, Break Through Poet Dead at 65
Harlem, New York
May 23, 1967
By Starr Sackstein

It was a sad day for all of the people in Harlem. James Mercer Langston Hughes better known as just Langston Hughes passed away in Polyclinic Hospital of cancer. Hughes is best known for his many prize-winning poems and short stories. He will be remembered and missed.
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1902. His parents, Carrie Langston Hughes, a schoolteacher and James Nathaniel Hughes, a storekeeper separated early in his life and he was raised until he was 12 by his grandparents in Lawrence, Kansas.
Hughes got the writing bug early in his life and began composing his beautiful poetry in elementary school. He was voted class poet while in the Eighth grade in Lincoln, Illinois. Even then, his classmates could see that he possessed something special.

Hughes was a Walt Whitman enthusiast as he too wrote about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters…people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.” He was a poet of the masses, speaking of his experiences of the world. His experiences were all of our experiences despite the chaos that lurked in our country.
Langston Hughes’ best-known works are “The Weary Blues,” “Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Not Without Laughter. He had written several volumes of poetry, six novels, nine young person’s novels, two autobiographies, a variety of short stories and sketches, plays, photo essays, translations, lyrics for musicals and operas, radio and television scripts, recordings and articles on an array of topics.

Langston Hughes lived at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem. He will be missed by the literary community as well as by his remaining family. He never married.