Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes #9

by Langston Hughes, Christopher C. De Santis (Editor)

Among the most prolific of American writers, Langston Hughes gained international attention and acclaim in nearly every genre of writing. While scholars and general readers have enjoyed relatively easy access to most of his writings, Hughes's work in one genre--"the essay"--has gone largely unnoticed. From his radical pieces praising revolutionary socialist ideology in the 1930s to the more conservative, previously unpublished "Black Writers in a Troubled World," which he wrote a year before his death, Hughes used the essay form as a vehicle through which to comment on the contemporary issues he found most pressing at various stages of his career.

Hughes generated some of his most powerful critiques of economic and racial exploitation and oppression through his masterful essays. It was the essay as a literary form that allowed Hughes to document the essential contributions made by African Americans to literature, music, film, and theater, and to chronicle the immense difficulties black artists faced in gaining recognition, fair remuneration, and professional advancement for these contributions. Finally, it was in certain essays that Hughes most fully represented the unique and endearing persona of the blues-poet-in-exile.

Many of the essays and other pieces of short nonfiction included in this volume have long been out of print and will be new to most readers. Through them, Langston Hughes reaffirmed a belief in the political potential of African American writers that remained consistent throughout his forty-six-year professional writing career: "Ours is a social as well as a literary responsibility." Such a belief resounds everywhere in this volume "a true testament of a man committed to the capabilities of language to generate social awareness and, ultimately, to compel social change."

Genres: Nonfiction

648 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

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

[Charisma Bell]

This was a really, really long book. It definitely took some commitment to finish it, more because it was a non fiction book, and there was no plot to distract me. However, I was able to get a clear view of Langston Hughes and his style of writing. I believe it is a book that every aspiring writer should try and read. Langston Hughes firmly believed in writing what you know. He believed that being an African American during the Jim Crow south was a big part of his physical identity, but he didn't want to let it fully take over his identity as a writer. He believed that art was a way to show people who they truly are. While all his work wasn't centered around the race problem, it was heavily influenced by his perception of what life was like for black people at the time. It was definitely inspirational in more ways then one. While I didn't start reading this HUGE book to help my writing, that's exactly what it ended up doing. It made me realize how important it is to have a voice, and not just constantly borrow from writers of the past. If every aspiring writer, only wrote like the writers and poets they admire and not bring forth anything personal, we would only be stuck with the same work. Langston Hughes taught me to write only for myself, and to write whatever I pleased. There are also some great essays about his travels. Learning about him in school, I had no idea that this man went everywhere. And I do mean EVERYWHERE. Africa, Haiti, Moscow, central Asia, Spain, Paris, and London. Its always nice to be pleasantly surprised by figures in history and I was by him, thanks to this book.