Happy earlier birthday to Langston Hughes

It turns out we’ve been wrong about Langston Hughes’s birthday all these years.

Poet Eric McHenry told The New York Times that he spotted a reference to “Little Langston Hughes” in a digitized version of the African-American newspaper for Topeka, Kansas.

The mention on December 20, 1901, is a few months before Hughes’s long-reported birth date of February 1, 1902.

More research in census reports and other historical documents provide solid evidence that it is, in fact, the famous poet and not another child with the same name.

You can read the original article here or The Guardian’s reporting here.