Langston Hughes

Selected Letters of Langston Hughes

A publishing event: for the first time ever, a glorious comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the canonical African American author-a virtual "life in letters," showcasing his struggles and extraordinary achievement.

This unprecedented collection of Langston Hughes's letters is arranged by decades, with helpful interstitial material and notes throughout to guide us through Hughes's journey in all its aspects: literary, personal, political, practical. His correspondents include such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright. The letters tell the story of a writer finding his voice; struggling with how to support himself in a literary career; reaching out to students in segregated schools in the South; using his artistic clout in the service of the disenfranchised or wrongly accused; and discovering, above all, that as an African American writer in a segregated America, his only true freedom was to be found on the page. Photographs and quotes from the poetry enliven the volume and give a fuller picture of this generous, visionary, and gratifyingly good man who was a genius of modern American letters.