The perfect introduction to one of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, featuring a career-spanning collection of poems and three of his most powerful stories.

"Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience." The Philadelphia Inquirer

Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Vintage Hughes includes the famed poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American Fragment," "Scottsboro," "The Negro Mother," "Good Morning Revolution," "I Dream a World," "The Heart of Harlem," "Freedom Train," "Song for Billie Holliday," "Nightmare Boogie," "Africa," "Black Panther," "Birmingham Sunday," and "UnAmerican Investigators"; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: "Cora Unashamed," "Home," and "The Blues I'm Playing."

Author: Langston Hughes
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/06/2004
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781400034024


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 12/15/2003 pg. 720

About the Author
LANGSTON HUGHES was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. By the time he enrolled in Columbia University he had already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in Crisis in 1921. Often regarded as "the poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was a cental figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Known for his insightful, colorful portayals of black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s, Hughes published more than thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, short stories, children's poetry, musicals, operans, autobiography, scripts, and essays.

Throughout hs life Hughes was a devoted fan of black music, and he fushed together jazz and blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew. He was also well known for his creation of the fictional character Jess B. Semple, nicknamed Simple, who satrized racial injustices. In 1929, Hughes earned his B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he was later presented with an honorary Litt.D. Over the course of his life, Hughes was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosenwald Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant. Hughes died in 1967.

Through his work condeming racism and celebrating African-American culture, Langston Hughes becaomse one of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth-century.