Langston Hughes

Photos by DeCarava, poetry by Hughes, set in a Harlem neighborhood, told from a woman’s point of view as she looks through her apartment window.

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."

Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind , Simple Takes a Wife , and Simple Stakes a Claim --have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple , the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition. Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof." As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations." Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, went to Cleveland, Ohio, lived for a number of years in Chicago, and long resided in New York City's Harlem. He graduated form Lincoln University in 1929 and was awarded an honorary Litt. D. in 1943. He was perhaps best known as a poet and the creator of Simple, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays (several of them Broadway hits), and children's books, and he edited several anthologies. Mr. Hughes died in 1967.

Versión de Alfonso Sastre Muestra del teatro social norteamericano. Obra antirracista que el autor escribió sobre su cuento "Padre e Hijo" y convirtió en una obra en tres actos. El adaptador la libera de esa estrecha estructura y la presenta como un relato en escenas trepidantes.

"HOLD FAST TO DREAMS / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly." The Dream Keeper, the great African-American writer Langston Hughes's only collection of poems for children, includes some of his best loved works. It is being reissued in a handsome hardcover edition in celebration of its 75th anniversary. Filled with elegant scratchboard illustrations by Caldecott Honor winner Brian Pinkey, and featuring an introduction by noted children's poet Lee Bennett Hopkins, this gift edition is sure to be cherished by young readers and longtime poetry lovers alike.

Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes was most well-known for his poems, novels, and plays that highlight Black American life in post-slavery America. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri and began writing poetry when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman before finishing his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later.   Setting the stage for an enduring and genre-defining career, Hughes wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering. He began writing short pieces in his personal notebooks before seeking a home for his resonant verse. Over the course of his four-decade career, Hughes published his first book of poetry with Knopf in 1926 as well as poems with Yale University and small, grassroots literary magazines. Today, he stands as one of the greatest literary innovators.   But how did this literary giant rise to such heights? Blues in Stereo zooms in on Hughes’s early work (1919-1929). National Book Award finalist Danez Smith joins as curator for this work, offering an introduction on Hughes’s lyrical, evocative, and award-winning poetry and notes on the formation of his signature style and craft. Collected from libraries and little-known publications across the country, Blues in Stereo features some of Hughes’s earliest undiscovered writings; the collection of his poems published in The Crisis, a monthly publication form the NAACP edited by W.E.B. DuBois from 1910-1934; and even an original unreleased play co-written with DuBois, complete with a full score. This beautifully rendered collection of Hughes’s early works is sure to become a bookshelf staple.  

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and ‘30s. One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Stories included in this collection: "Cora Unashamed" "Slave on the Block" "Home" "Passing" "A Good Job Gone" "Rejuvenation Through Joy" "The Blues I'm Playing" "Red-Headed Baby" "Poor Little Black Fellow" "Little Dog" "Berry" "Mother and Child" "One Christmas Eve" "Father and Son"

Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” (Poetry Foundation)

The definitive sampling of a writer whose poems were “at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism itself, and today are fundamentals of American culture” (OPRAH Magazine).Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.The collection spans five decades, and is comprised of 868 poems (nearly 300 of which never before appeared in book form) with annotations by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes Hughes's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed

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 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 “Cora Unashamed,” “Home,” and “The Blues I’m Playing.”

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. 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.