Synopses & Reviews
David Roessel is the associate editor, with Arnold Rampersad, of
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, as well as the coeditor, with Nicholas Moschovakis, of
The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams and
Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays by Tennessee Williams. He is the author of
In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, which won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, and is the Peter and Stella Yiannos Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Arnold Rampersad, the Sarah Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, was a longtime Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University, where he was also director of American Studies and director of the Program in African American Studies. His books include the two-volumeLife of Langston Hughes, as well as biographies of Jackie Robinson and Ralph Ellison. His numerous awards and honors include the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House in 2011.
About the Author
This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the iconic and beloved Langston Hughes. It offers a life in letters that showcases his many struggles as well as his memorable achievements. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes’s journey in all its aspects: personal, political, practical, and—above all—literary. His letters range from those written to family members, notably his father (who opposed Langston’s literary ambitions), and to friends, fellow artists, critics, and readers who sought him out by mail. These figures include personalities such as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Vachel Lindsay, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Kurt Weill, Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, and Muhammad Ali. The letters tell the story of a determined poet precociously finding his mature voice; struggling to realize his literary goals in an environment generally hostile to blacks; reaching out bravely to the young and challenging them to aspire beyond the bonds of segregation; using his artistic prestige to serve the disenfranchised and the cause of social justice; irrepressibly laughing at the world despite its quirks and humiliations. Venturing bravely on what he called the “big sea” of life, Hughes made his way forward always aware that his only hope of self-fulfillment and a sense of personal integrity lay in diligently pursuing his literary vocation. Hughes’s voice in these pages, enhanced by photographs and quotations from his poetry, allows us to know him intimately and gives us an unusually rich picture of this generous, visionary, gratifyingly good man who was also a genius of modern American letters.