Vintage Hughes

by Langston Hughes

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.”

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Short Stories, Fiction, Race, Literature, American

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2004

About the author

Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).

People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strong, direct poetry that speaks to the mind and the heart of any caring human being!

I love Langston Hughes for his bravery, for his courage to put the grief of discrimination and the longing for freedom and equality into short, rhythmic, narrative poems of such power that they send shivers down my spine. I have read this collection countless times, and my pain and pleasure increase with my experience of the world.

When he sings of the America of his dreams - an America that has never existed, but will maybe some day be possible - he does so in the voice of those who were not invited to participate in the "glory" and the "opportunities" of the "land of the free". Facing injustice, poverty, racism, police brutality and daily humiliations, people learn to see America for what it is - beyond the shiny advertisement, preachy propaganda and loud-mouthed nationalism.

When he exclaims "I, too, am America", I want to add "And we, too, are the world", for the issues that his poems reflect on are not America's alone, they are the world's, and we have to reach out and dream impossible dreams to achieve the change that seems out of reach, now as much as when Hughes wrote his songs celebrating freedom.

"To You
To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now -
our problem world -
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered free - help me!
All you who are dreamers, too,
Help me make our world anew.
I reach out my hands to you."

#takeakneefortheworld

[Tim Null · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I made a list of my five favorite poets there would only be three poets on that list, and Langston Hughes would be on the top of the list.

Death of an Old Seaman

We buried him high on a windy hill,
But his soul went out to sea.
I know, for I heard, when all was still,
His sea-soul say to me:

Put no tombstone at my head,
For here I do not make my bed.
Strew no flowers on my grave,
I've gone back to wind and wave.
Do not, do not weep for me,
For I am happy with my sea.

Langston Hughes

[Prerna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Langston Hughes has a way of writing about black women and their pain and suffering (especially in the series of poems called 'madam to you') that's almost songlike, that's also so full of vulnerability and identification. These poems enrapture you, and you know they come from a place of close association.

She stands
In the quiet darkness,
This troubled woman
Bowed by
Weariness and pain
Like an
Autumn flower
In the frozen rain,
Like a
Wind-blown autumn flower
That never lifts its head
Again.

He also has a way of writing about death, grief and sorrow, particularly the black man's sorrow, that brilliantly showcases the universal within the particular. I don't mean to appropriate the black man's pain here, I cannot lay any claim to it. I only mean to say that Hughes conveys the sentiment within a black man's heart so well, that we cannot help but feel as though our hearts are being squeezed.

But most of all, Hughes dreams and sings of freedom. Because that's all the dispossessed first think of - freedom.

There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being—
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
               BETTER TO DIE FREE,
               THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.

[Ria · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars and i don't even like poetry

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fittingly, I finished reading this book on the Fourth of July. Few poets are as deeply integrated into the fabric of American culture as Langston Hughes, and many of these poems were ones I had known and admired for many years already, including "Ku Klux" (an impressively sparse, lean ballad, its characters pared down to mere pronouns, its setting described simply as a "lonesome place" -- and yet so harrowing!), "Mama and Daughter" (another exemplary modern use of the centuries-old English ballad form, its dialogue redolent with verisimilitude), and "Dream Dust" (a poem almost haiku-like in its birdbone-spare, finely etched lines).

Other poems were new to me. Of these, I particularly enjoyed "To Be Somebody" (who can help loving a poem that describes a grand piano as "paddle-tailed"?) and "Island [2]" (a poem that pithily describes the African-American experience of the American dream as a "dream within a dream"). I marveled at Hughes's sophisticated use of repetition and variation in the poems "Same in Blue" and "Song for Billie Holiday" ("What can purge my heart/of the song/and the sadness?/What can purge my heart/but the song/of the sadness?/What can purge my heart/of the sadness/of the song?"). Additionally, I was tickled by the wry humor in the playfully rhymed poems "Crowns and Garlands" ("I love Ralph Bunche,/but I can't eat him for lunch") and "Could Be" ("When you pawned my watch,/you pawned my heart...//Any place is dreary/without my watch and you").

One thing I didn't know about Hughes until I read this book, and which I think most Americans don't know either, is how far left on the political spectrum he sometimes veered: his poetry is often boldly, unstintingly revolutionary (consider: he invokes Lenin's name in two separate poems, without irony).

[Kristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would list my favorite poems, but there are too many. Just read them all.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone knows who Langston Hughes is, of course. I had read his poems in various collections, but I had never read a book of just his work. Wow! The dude was incandescent!!. He was talking about a revolution! Most of the poems have a catchy rhythm and rhyme. Sadly, many of his poems are just as relevant today as they were in the 60s.

Dinner Guest: Me
I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To Probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A.--
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Murmuring gently
Over fraises du bois,
"I'm so ashamed of being white."

The lobster is delicious,
The wine divine,
And center of attention
At the damask table, mine.
To be a Problem on
Park Avenue at eight
Is not so bad.
Solutions to the Problem,
Of course, wait.

Comment on War
Let us kill off youth
For the sake of truth.

We who are old know what truth is —
Truth is a bundle of vicious lies
Tied together and sterilized —
A war-makers' bait for unwise youth
To kill off each other
For the sake of
Truth.

And some of his poems are tiny and quiet and charming.

Snail
Little snail,
Dreaming you go.
Weather and rose
Is all you know.

Weather and rose
Is all you see,
Drinking
The dewdrop’s
Mystery.

I read this particular volume because I wanted to read a book of Langston Hughes poems, and this is what my library had. I was surprised that there is no Introduction with a bit of information on Hughes and his contemporaries, and no note about why these poems were chosen. I was also surprised that this did not include what I consider to be Hughes most well-known poem, Dreams ("Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die ..."). I don't always read the introductions to collections, but it's nice at least to know why the poems in the collection were chosen. I can't give this book five stars because of this.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite my English degree, I've never been a big poetry fan. One of the biggest exceptions to this has been Langston Hughes, so when I had to read a book of poetry for the Read Harder challenge, I knew who the author was going to be.

This collection is really a great introduction to his work, with some of his best known poems, including the one that first captured my heart, Harlem. It also includes some of his short stories, which I didn't know existed, so that was a wonderful revelation.

While I know that our life experiences are really night and day apart, there is still so much that speaks to me in Hughes' work and I expect I'll delve into it even further in the future, since this book only whetted my appetiete for more.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had forgotten how much I loved Langston Hughes.

[Amelia Gray]

Took me a second to get into these because his writing style feels like jazz; it’s really free-flowing and, honestly, hard for me to follow as someone new to the genre. But I stuck with it and ended up immensely enjoying it by the end. I’m a little illiterate in his world/context to fully understand his work. I KNOW I missed a lot of connections because of this, so I’m going to hold off on rating it for that reason, but I’m really glad to have read this collection.

These are some that really stuck with me: I, Too; Cross; Let America Be America Again

The real kicker was the short stories at the end of the book:
- Cora Unashamed (made me cry in the span of 12 pages)
- Home (almost made me cry and did make me realize Langston Hughes is a genius as a writer)
- The Blues I’m Playing (changed something inside of me)

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”

[Nazary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. The only bitterness to his honey like words is how many of the themes still resonate today.

[Cubierocks · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Let America be America Again" "The Negro Mother" "Freedom's Plow" "The Bitter River" "To You" "Cora Unashamed" and "The Blues I'm Playing" are my favorites here.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew what to expect from Hughes's poetry, having read it before, but this was the first time I had read any of his prose. As impressed as I am by Hughes's poetry, I'm all the more impressed by his short stories. They're unlike anything I've ever read. They are potent - both in terms of the author's style and his ability to contain a wealth of detail with an economy words, and the author's ability to covey an anger that is his anger and the anger of his characters and the anger of a community. He speaks not only for the black communities of Harlem and the Southern USA, but every black community in the USA and the common experience that unites them. This solidarity is best exemplified by one of Hughes's poems...

America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
- Freedom's Plow (pg. 59)

Unfortunately, the collection only includes three short stories (Cora Unashamed; Home; and The Blues I'm Playing), selected from THE WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS. Of the three, "Home" stood out as much for the power of the story as for the resemblance of this story, its style and content, and other stories I've read recently - among them, Flannery O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill" and Richard Yates's "A Really Good Jazz Piano". Not to mention the climactic ending, from which Nathanael West may have taken a page for the climax of his DAY OF THE LOCUST.

Another comparison I would like to draw is between the poem "Good Morning Revolution" and the novel TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA by Richard Brautigan. In both cases I have encountered, in a way I haven't encountered elsewhere, the personification of an abstract. In TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, Brautigan takes the title, TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, and renders it into as many personal or impersonal forms as he can imagine - writing letters to the title of the book, naming a character Trout Fishing in America Shorty, etc... In "Good Morning Revolution", Hughes addresses the Revolution as if it were a close friend...

Good morning, Revolution:
You are the best friend
I ever had.
We gonna pal around together from now on.
Say, listen, Revolution:
You know the boss where I used to work,
The guy that gimme the air to cut expenses,
He wrote a long letter to the papers about you:
Said you was a trouble maker, a alien-enemy,
In other words a son-of-a-bitch.
He called up the police
And told’em to watch out for a guy
Named Revolution

You see,
The boss knows you are my friend.
He sees us hanging out together
He knows we’re hungry and ragged,
And ain’t got a damn thing in this world –
And are gonna to do something about it.
(pg. 38)

The selection also contains one of the poems for which Hughes is best known, "Harlem"...

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
(pg. 108)

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was amazing, although, I don’t think I was expecting any different from Langston Hughes. I haven’t really read any of his poetry since having to read him in elementary school and they definitely didn’t let us read any of this. The only poem of his I read as an adult was his poem entitled, “Lenin,” which I love (it’s on my wall) so finally reading some more of his work was great. Put Langston Hughes down on the list of yet another African American “icon” whose politics have been extremely watered down in the historical memory, in our schooling, as well as for Black History Month. This is probably premature of me to say given that I’m a mood reader and my reading ability sucks these days but I’m declaring 2024 my year of Langston. Aside from wanting to read more poetry I hope I can get around to reading his autobiography and short story collection The Best of Simple I recently bought.

* btw there are 3 short stories in here from his short story collection The Ways of White Folks but I skipped those because I intend to read that book in full at some point.

[Zoe Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vintage Hughes is a collection of poems by a poet named Langston Hughes who was a african american. The poems in this book about what he as a person went through in 1920s through the 1960s. He was the central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s which was the time of the culture movement. The point of views he writes about in the poems has to do with crosses the boundaries of race,age,and gender equality. My thoughts in the book was it changed how i see people even if they are not african american . The poems is in this book are very brief but still have a way of telling the story. They all have so much meaning to the writer and you can really see it when you are reading them. My favorite poem in the book Negro, in the poem he says the color of his skin is black as the night and he was told to keep the door steps clean.Theses two lines tell so much to me about him that he was african american and that he was a slave and being in the era that he was in it shows what it was really like and what he was going through. He went through heartbreak in the book. The poem Late Last Night he says i was cryin’ cause you broke my heart in two i feel thi shows that he is human and is no different to anyone just cause of his skin color,he has feeling just like everyone else in the world.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book after reading some of Langston Hughes’ poems in various English classes. There is so much soul and pain but also hope in his poems. There are cries of anguish and shouts for joy. Some of the poems make me want to learn more about Harlem and jazz to understand them better, and others seem perfectly timeless. My favorite poem is Let America Be America Again- it is so powerful and I think it is a perfect response to the slogan “Make America Great Again”. Hughes invites you to see the world through his eyes and the eyes of others living in the Harlem Renaissance, and he encourages you to change it with him. The short stories were a pleasant surprise (I thought the book was just poems)- poignant, powerful, and flowing. Like his poetry they really leave you thinking.

[Megan Mellino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hughes has a wonderful way of writing. He seems to write for the "everyman"- he doesn't use big words and uses a lot of slang. His poems read like he's telling you a story, and because of that they're very relatable. There were a couple poems that weren't for me- the ones that were half poem, half instruction as to the song that should be playing- that were really hard for me to follow.

Towards the end of this collection, there are three stories from his "The Ways of White Folks" collection that I enjoyed immensely. The first two were pretty depressing, but all three were wonderfully, conversationally written, and has definitely made me interested in checking out more of his work in the future!

[thewordlover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of Langston Hughes a really long time, but mostly because of the one poem "Theme for English B". This collection opened my eyes to the breadth and depth of his writing genius, in poetry and prose. I was completely unaware of his gift for the short story, and I was especially riveted by "The Blues I'm Playing". What a great story with so much going on under the surface, on the nature of art, of heterosexual relationships, and of viewing others as whole people versus just "artists".

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of this expertly curated collection of writing is poetry which is a good thing as so many of the poems are wonderful. The book -- which spans Langston Hughes' career -- also reminded me how powerful rhyme can be in verse, although that device has fallen out of fashion for awhile now. As for the three short stories (all from "The Ways of White Folks"), they're excellent too. No intro. No afterword. None needed.

[Jasonlylescampbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hughes is amazing. His poetry is powerful, his prose is powerful, his stories are powerful. I will be coming back to Hughes.

Durban, Birmingham,
Cape Town, Atlanta,
Johannesburg, Watts,
The earth around
Struggling, fighting,
Dying--for what?

A world to gain.

Groping, hoping,
Waiting--for what?

A world to gain.

Dreams kicked asunder,
Why not go under?

There's a world to gain.

But suppose I don't want it,
Why take it?

To remake it.

[Jonathan Ehrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

The content itself is very very good! That said, as a sampler anthology it covers his entire career, with a wide variety of styles and a mixture of both poetry and prose. The end result feels a bit random and slapdash, rather than feeling like catered samples of a particular set of pieces or of his best work.

Is Hughes worth reading? Of course he is! But I think I'd recommend reading a specific book of poetry or The Ways of White Folks rather than this collection.

[Coco Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first introduction to Langston Hughes, and I’m a fan! He has a lyrical style of writing that allows the poems to come off as jazz or blues type of songs. You can almost hear the words being sung.

Topics in this collection surrounded his life during the Harlem renaissance. Some were heartbreaking to read, but his optimism and hopes also shown through. I’ve marked many new favorites from this collection and he will be a poet I revisit.

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—/Let it be that great strong land of love/Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme/That any man be crushed by one above./(It never was America to me.)/O, let my land be a land where Liberty/Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,/But opportunity is real, and life is free,/Equality is in the air we breathe.

Still such a prescient poet for our times, I'm glad to have made your acquaintance Mr Hughes.

[Brandon Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, beautiful and revolutionary - Lyrically and politically. - Hughes wrote like Charlie Parker soloed and his amazing sense of rhythm propels you from sentence to sentence, from page to page and poem to poem. In other words, the writing is downright addicting. This is perhaps my third volume of Hughes' poetry and it is easily my favorite.

[David Doel · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read poetry, there is some I like and some I don't regardless of the author. Langston Hughes is no different. I really liked "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Aunt Sue's Stories," "I Too," "Birmingham Sunday," and several others.

There are three short stories in this collection. All are excellent.

[Brett Van Gaasbeek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the basics of Hughes, both in his poetry and short stories. I have never really been a fan of his narratives, but his poetry is amazing in both social commentary and creativity. There were some of his poems that did not make the book, but it is still a solid collection of his work. A good read no matter the time or place in American history.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading these poems out loud to myself! One was so beautifully written it made me tear up a little— very rarely do I ever feel that moved by art! This is a great “gateway” to Hughes and definitely makes the reader want to read more by him

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[José · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were lots of good Hughes poems I hadn’t read before. At the end, there’s a few short stories - I didn’t know he wrote stories!