Langston Hughes

"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their...

Presents the popular poem by one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance, highlighting the courage and dignity of the African American Pullman porters in the early twentieth century.

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 editors, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, have aimed to recover all of the poems that Hughes published in his lifetime - in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals, and in his books of verse. They present the poems in the general order...

For every jazz joint that opened in Korean War-era Harlem, a new church seemed to spring up. This novel introduces you to an unlikely team behind a church whose rock was the curb at 126th and Lenox. Essie Belle and Laura live in tenement flats, on public relief. Essie wants to somehow earn enough money to reunite with her daughter and provide her with a nice home; Laura loves young men, mink coats, and fine Scotch. The friends decide to use a thrift-store...

Arguably the most important writer to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, Langston Hughes was a great poet and a shrewd and lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Vintage Hughes includes the poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American...