Series:

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes

9 total works

Cover of Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 8; Later Simple Stories

In Volume 8 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, the genial Harlem everyman, Jesse B. Semple returns with his more cosmopolitan bar buddy, Ananias Boyd. Social climber Joyce Lane is now Mrs. Jesse B. Semple, and Simple has minimized his flirtatious contacts with other women. Despite these ongoing characters, the later Simple stories are very different from the earlier Simple tales. The later stories evoke the historical and social context within which they were written, a politically dangerous time for the fictional adventures and fantasies of the main characters.

The Later Simple Stories returns to print Hughes's third and fourth Simple collections, Simple Stakes a Claim and Simple's Uncle Sam, along with some episodes Hughes did not include in any of his books. Simple Stakes a Claim was published in 1957, and it reflects the troubled and troublesome era of the Cold War and McCarthy hearings. Simple's Uncle Sam appeared in 1965, and it captures the turbulent decade when black Americans asserted their rights, including the privilege to call themselves "Black" and wear their hair in natural styles. The nonviolent strategies of civil disobedience and the violent strategies of urban rioting had converged to amplify African American voices as they demanded justice.

The innocent humor of the earlier Simple stories is replaced here by new strengths. Remarkably powerful female characters emerge in this volume. We observe Cousin Minnie's self-preservation skills and her willingness to riot to defend her rights as a citizen. We read about Simple's cousin Lynn Clarisse, who is a social activist educated at Fisk University. And we see Joyce herself emerge from her prim niche to display pride and knowledge about her African heritage.

The Later Simple Stories rounds out Hughes's presentation of Jesse B. Semple and the various people of his world. Simple and his foil still make us chuckle, but more important, they make us think. While these episodes often focus on particularities of the times, they also articulate broader truths that remain valuable.

Cover of Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 13; Big Sea

Langston Hughes was among the Harlem Renaissance authors who traveled widely during the 1920s. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, covering the years through 1931, Hughes offers recollections of his childhood in Kansas, his high school years in Cleveland, his sojourn with his father in Mexico, and his initial reactions to New York City and Harlem.

Commentaries on the "Black Renaissance" in Harlem and Washington, D.C., are intertwined with recollections of his student years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, his travels through the South, and his association as a "younger generation" poet with the New York and Harlem literary establishment represented by the magazines Crisis and Opportunity. Personal memories of Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, Vachel Lindsay, A'Lelia Walker, and others are augmented by allusions to such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Florence Mills, Eubie Blake, Florence Embry, Josephine Baker, Bert Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, and Bessie Smith. Hughes addresses such controversial issues as his literary and personal disagreements with Zora Neale Hurston over their play Mule Bone, Carl Van Vechten's problematic novel Nigger Heaven, racial matters at Lincoln University, the Jim Crow laws in the South, and the failures of white patronage. Furthermore, Hughes refers to the sources of a blues poetry aesthetic, his visit to Cuba, and the struggle to complete his first novel, Not without Laughter. A rare autobiographical presentation of the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of an insider, The Big Sea is a veritable catalog of notables. In addition, it offers a "black perspective" on the expatriate life in Europe during the Jazz Age.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 3; Poems 1951-1967
Volume 3 collects the poems of the last period of Hughes's life. Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) brilliantly fused the modernist dissonances of bebop jazz with his perception of Harlem life as both a triumph of hope and a potential crisis (""What happens to a dream deferred?""). In the tumultuous following years, he refused to relinquish the mantle of the poet, as may be seen in his inspired last two books of verse, Ask Your Mama (1961) and The Panther and the Lash (1967). The former demonstrate Hughes's continuing alertness to the significance of black music as a guide to American reality, here, avant-garde jazz rhythms and allusions fueled an intensity of language that predicted the cultural upheavals of the sixties and seventies. Hughes's last volume, combining old and new poems, emphasized the struggle for civil rights in the face of reactionary defiance, on the one hand, and the volatility of Black Power, on the other. Vigorous and versatile to the end, Hughes concluded his career as he had begun it a master poet dedicated to observing and celebrating African American culture in its full complexity.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 10; Fight for Freedom and Related Writing
Nearing the end of a distinguished literary career that spanned nearly fifty years, Langston Hughes took on the daunting task of writing the official history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Beginning with the social, political, and economic contexts that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and ending with a summary of its targeted goals for 1963, Hughes attempted to write a history that would be comprehensive in scope and singular in its purpose of highlighting the ways in which the Association had a direct and positive impact on racial justice in the United States. Long before the publication of Fight for Freedom, Hughes had begun writing nonfictional, journalistic prose about these same issues as a regular columnist for the nation's most influential African American publications, including the Chicago Defender and Crisis. A selection of these popular columns and other essays - which reveal the extent to which Hughes's unique, varied, and sometimes Blues-tinged narrative voice shifted in tone over the course of his extensive career - is included in this volume. Hughes intersperses historical facts with compelling anecdotes that often frame subtly ironic commentaries on various themes. The result is history that provides a lens through which to view Hughes's attitudes in the early 1960s toward the ways the NAACP addressed the vital social, cultural, political, and economic issues central to its agenda.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 4; Novels - ""Not without Laughter"" and ""Tambourines to Glory
Although best known as a poet, Langston Hughes was also the author of two novels that richly evoke the black experience in America. First published in 1930 and 1958, respectively, Not without Laughter and Tambourines to Glory reflect the early and late vision of one of the twentieth century's most distinguished men of letters. In his introduction to this combined edition of both novels. Dolan Hubbard addresses Hughes's growing influence on American letters and reveals how a black aesthetic tradition shaped his art and his imagination. Hughes shows us how the discourse of black America informs and alters our understanding of cultural history and of aesthetic values. In Not without Laughter, he movingly tells the story of a black boy growing into manhood in a small Kansas town during the early twentieth century and his experiences with race, family, school, work, music, and religion. His grandmother, a humble religious woman, struggles to keep her family, three daughters and a son-in-law together, on the meager income she earns by taking in washing. Set in Harlem, the center of Hughes's spiritual universe, Tambourines to Glory is an urban folk melodrama based on the black fusion of Christian hymns and spirituals with the blues. This comic novel captures the spirit of newly transplanted southern blacks who bend the alien rhythms of the city to the gospel sound. In 1963, Hughes would adapt his novel to a long-running play by the same name. This volume of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes is a testament to a man whose life and writings have had a profound influence on world literature and is proof that Hughes's immense talent embraced not only poetry, but fiction as well.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 5; Plays to 1942 - ""Mulatto"" to ""The Sun Do Move
But someday somebody'll Stand up and talk about me - Black and beautiful - And sing about me. And put on plays about me! I reckon it'll be Me myself! Yes, it'll be me. Langston Hughes is least known for his theatrical endeavors, yet his attention to the theater was lifelong. His love of the stage began in childhood, and from the late 1920s on he was continually writing plays, for black community theater, for theater companies he established himself, and for the Broadway and off-Broadway stage. His early plays endeavor to provide ""authentic"" representations of African American life, both to counter and correct the stereotypical stage portrayals of African Americans in white theater and to provide suitable plays for black theater companies hungry for scripts that would entertain and challenge black audiences. Volume 5 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes includes the plays Hughes wrote between 1930 and 1942, alone and in collaboration. Almost all the plays were performed during the same period; a few have never seen the stage, but are included because they indicate the range of Hughes's artistic and political concerns. Because very few of the plays in this volume have been previously published, they disclose a side of Langston Hughes's artistry that is virtually unknown.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 7; Early Simple Stories
Jesse B. Semple first sprang to life in Langston Hughes's weekly Chicago Defender column in 1943. Almost immediately, the ""Simple stories,"" as they were routinely called, had a large and ever-increasing audience. Simple soon became Harlem's Everyman - an ordinary black workingman, representative of the masses of black folks in the 1940s. Simple had migrated to Harlem, like many other blacks, seeking to escape the racism of the South, and he celebrated his new freedoms despite the economic struggles he still confronted. Simple's bar buddy and foil in the stories is the better-educated, more articulate Boyd who has never lived in the South. Their conversations permit Simple to speak the wisdom of the working class. By the time the first book of Simple stories was published, Hughes had honed and polished these two characters, enhancing the distinctions between the vernacular language of Simple and the more educated diction of his friend. Remaining within the Afrocentric world that was his chosen sphere, Hughes makes clear the message that Simple and Boyd are very much alike; both are black men in a racially unbalanced society. Both exist in a world within a world, in Harlem, the separate black community of New York City. Countless exchanges between Simple and his companion offer wit and wisdom that remind contemporary readers why Langston Hughes is so special.

Cover of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 12; Works for Children and Young Adults - Biographies
The twelfth volume of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes contains Hughes's collections of biographies for children and young adults - Famous American Negroes, Famous Negro Music Makers, and Famous Negro Heroes of America - gathered together for the first time. In these works, Hughes sought to remedy decades of historical and cultural neglect by telling the stories of African Americans who had made vital contributions to the construction of the American identity. Hughes made clear his commitment to an inclusive and diverse accounting of the achievements of African Americans on American soil, from vernacular expression to high culture, oratory to combat, geographical exploration to intellectual introspection. His lively and dramatic portraits of African Americans such as Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, and Mahalia Jackson, battling against exclusivity and adversity to achieve their full potential present a captivating portrait of America. This volume is a valuable record of the emerging African American struggle for civil rights and positive self-determination. It also documents Hughes's interests as he entered the fifth decade of his life, and can be read fruitfully alongside his writing for adults at the time, reflecting his sociocultural and political thought.

Cover of Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 9; Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs

Among the most prolific of American writers, Langston Hughes gained international attention and acclaim in nearly every genre of writing. While scholars and general readers have enjoyed relatively easy access to most of his writings, Hughes's work in one genre "the essay" has gone largely unnoticed. From his radical pieces praising revolutionary socialist ideology in the 1930s to the more conservative, previously unpublished "Black Writers in a Troubled World," which he wrote a year before his death, Hughes used the essay form as a vehicle through which to comment on the contemporary issues he found most pressing at various stages of his career.

Hughes generated some of his most powerful critiques of economic and racial exploitation and oppression through his masterful essays. It was the essay as a literary form that allowed Hughes to document the essential contributions made by African Americans to literature, music, film, and theater, and to chronicle the immense difficulties black artists faced in gaining recognition, fair remuneration, and professional advancement for these contributions. Finally, it was in certain essays that Hughes most fully represented the unique and endearing persona of the blues-poet-in-exile.

Many of the essays and other pieces of short nonfiction included in this volume have long been out of print and will be new to most readers. Through them, Langston Hughes reaffirmed a belief in the political potential of African American writers that remained consistent throughout his forty-six-year professional writing career: "Ours is a social as well as a literary responsibility." Such a belief resounds everywhere in this volume "a true testament of a man committed to the capabilities of language to generate social awareness and, ultimately, to compel social change."