 Langston Hughes, a native of Joplin, Missouri, became one of the most popular figures of the Harlem Renaissance.  His goal was to write a truly "Negro" poetry without perpetuating racial stereotypes.  Wealthy patrons helped him to publish his first volume of poetry -- The Weary Blues (1926) -- to go through college, and to support himself while writing.  In the 1930s, Hughes became increasingly involved in radical politics and joined the American Communist Party because of its claim to represent all races equally in its working-class solidarity.  During the 1950s he completed several memorable anthologies, including The First Book of Negros (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958).

 "Mother to Son," one of Langston Hughes's earliest poems, takes the form of a dramatic monologue; that is, a poem spoken not in the poet's own voice but in that of a particular imagined speaker, in this case a weary mother addressing her son.  The son, as we can surmise from the first line, has either asked his mother a question or complained of his frustrations, to which his mother responds, "Well, son, I'll tell you."  She proceeds to recount for her son the difficulties of her own life, telling him "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair," yet suggesting to him that those difficulties are, if not ultimately surmountable, at least worth struggling against:

 The poem's use of the dramatic monologue places the reader in the position of the son, listening to his mother draw a lesson from her life that can be applied to his own. The reader is thus drawn into the poem, as the son's frustrations become our own, and the mother's advice becomes directed at us.