Best Selling Books by Langston Hughes

Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes''s poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s.

The sixteen volumes are published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar lume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.

The sixteen volumes are published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar lume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.

Depicts a Black family''s attempts to deal with life in a small Kansas town.

Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

The sixteen volumes are published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar lume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.

Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What''s less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless. Despite their differences — Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met–Hughes’ and Van Vechten’s shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone — from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. It’s a correspondence that, as Emily Bernard notes in her introduction, provides “an unusual record of entertainment, politics, and culture as seen through the eyes of two fascinating and irreverent men.

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance." Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

Hughes''s last collection of poems commemorates the experience of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear—the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time. “Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America''s acknowledged poet of color. Here, Hughes''s voice—sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful—is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as "Prime," "Motto," "Dream Deferred," "Frederick Douglas: 1817-1895," "Still Here," "Birmingham Sunday." " History," "Slave," "Warning," and "Daybreak in Alabama."

The first published poetry collection from the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet behind such works as “Montage of a Dream Deferred” and “Life is Fine.” Originally published in 1926, The Weary Blues is Langston Hughes’s first collection of poetry. Broken into seven thematic sections, the sixty-eight poems capture the heart of a young budding artist and the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The title poem, “The Weary Blues,” tells the story of a musician performing in a bar and uses a very lyrical style that flows throughout the collection. Other poems include, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Danse Africaine,” “Dream Variation,” “Mother to Son,” “Suicide’s Note,” and “Winter Moon.” The work touches on subjects like art, identity, race, class, urban life, music, and the Black experience in 1920s America.

Langston Hughes has long been acknowledged as the voice, and his poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, the song, of the Harlem Renaissance. Although he was only seventeen when he composed it, Hughes already had the insight to capture in words the strength and courage of black people in America. /DIVDIV Artist E.B. Lewis acts as interpreter and visionary, using watercolor to pay tribute to Hughes’s timeless poem, a poem that every child deserves to know.

Langston Hughes, one of America''s greatest writers, was an innovator of jazz poetry and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance whose poems and plays resonate widely today. Accessible, personal, and inspirational, Hughes’s poems portray the African American community in struggle in the context of a turbulent modern United States and a rising black freedom movement. This indispensable volume of letters between Hughes and four leftist confidants sheds vivid light on his life and politics. Letters from Langston begins in 1930 and ends shortly before his death in 1967, providing a window into a unique, self-created world where Hughes lived at ease. This distinctive volume collects the stories of Hughes and his friends in an era of uncertainty and reveals their visions of an idealized world—one without hunger, war, racism, and class oppression.

A collection of columns written by Langston Hughes between 1942 and 1962 for the "Chicago Defender," offering his views on international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

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.

Presents selected works from "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes," and "The Ways of White Folks."

A selection of the author''s favorite stories chosen from three of his books: "Simple Speaks his Mind," "Simple Takes a Wife," and "Simple Stakes a Claim."

Stories capturing “the vibrancy of Harlem life, the passions of ordinary black people, and the indignities of everyday racism” by “a great American writer” (Kirkus Reviews). This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963—the most comprehensive available—showcases Langston Hughes’s literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns in the decades that preceded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes’s uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general. “[Hughes’s fiction] manifests his ‘wonder at the world.’ As these stories reveal, that wonder has lost little of its shine.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Collected humorous stories from the iconic American writer’s newspaper column, featuring his most memorable and spirited fictional character. In 1940, Langston Hughes introduced Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” to readers in his Chicago Defender column, “From Here to Yonder.” From his familiar perch in a fictional Harlem bar, Simple held forth on a variety of subjects—low wages, interracial marriage, birth control, race riots, the police—then central to black life in urban America. More than fifty years later, Simple’s concerns are, startlingly, still ours, and his voice, ringing with poetic wisdom and humor, reminds us of the rich African American folk tradition Langston Hughes helped to revive. This brilliantly edited collection by Akiba Sullivan Harper brings together the best stories from a number of Simple volumes long out of print and a few never before published. Its feel is so contemporary and relevant to American life one must marvel at Hughes’s ability to pass through the barrier of time. Praise for The Return of Simple “A glorious revelation . . . a chance for fairweather Hughes fans to acquaint themselves with something other than his poems and plays. This is the author as loquacious unleashed social commentator, who—prompted by ‘just one more beer, my friend’—holds up a mirror and shows us the world, which hasn’t changed very much, not in all this time.” —Boston Globe “Hughes’s slices of urban black life belong also to the larger continuum of great American humor, from Mark Twain to Armistead Maupin. Quite simply, an indispensable part of our cultural heritage.” —Kirkus Reviews

For the first time in many years, Langston Hughes''s published collections of stories are now available in a single book. Included in this volume are: Ways of White Folks, originally published in 1934; Laughing to Keep from Crying, originally published in 1952; and additional stories from Something in Common and Other Stories, originally published in 1963; as well as previously uncollected stories. These fictions, carefully crafted in the language Hughes loved, manifest the many themes for which he is best known. We meet and come to know many characters--black and white, young and old, men and women & mdash;all as believable as our own families, friends, and acquaintances. Hughes''s stories portray people as they actually are: a mixture of good, bad, and much in-between. In these short stories, as in the Simple stories, the reader enjoys Hughes''s humor and irony. The stories show us his inclination to mock himself and his beloved people, as much as he ridicules the flaws of those who belittle his race. His genuine characters interact and realistically bring to life this era of America''s past. By maintaining the form and format of the original story collections, this volume presents Hughes''s stories as he wanted them to be read. This volume will be an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in African American literature generally and the fiction of Langston Hughes specifically.

A compilation of writings by early twentieth-century African-American author Langston Hughes, including excerpts from novels and autobiographies, short stories, plays, poems, songs, and essays.

Illus. in black-and-white. This classic collection of poetry is available in a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after The Dream Keeper was first published. In a larger format, featuring Brian Pinkney''s scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes''s inspirational message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932.

Reprint. Previously published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

A pictorial history of the Negro in American entertainment.

Stories of Negro life in Harlem as told through a series of conversations.

THE STORY: The New York Journal-American, called SIMPLY HEAVENLY ...a treat. This story by Langston Hughes, based on his novels about Jesse B. Semple, a Joe Doakes Harlemite, seems...to capture the color and the humor and poetry of these neighbors-to-