The poems in this volume were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and encompass work from his entire career. His poetry launched a revolution among black writers in America....

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.
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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.
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A classic of African-American literature, with a new introduction by Maya Angelou, presents a coming-of-age novel filled with lyricism and humor and set in a small Kansas town during the early twentieth century. Reprint. 15,000 first printing....

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language....

The appearance in 1926 of Langston Hughes's first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, announced the arrival on the American literary scene not only of a new voice and tone, but also of a new sort of voice. Close to the rhythms of Negro speech and song, these apparently artless verses -- which, of course, in reality proclaim a poet of sophistication and keen sensibility -- brought to many readers throughout the English-speaking world a new enjoyment of the multifarious voices of Harlem and the other places where Negroes live in large numbers. Since The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes -- to mention only his verse -- has published Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), The Dream Keeper (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), One Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961), and The Panther and the Lash (1967).

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes represents Langston Hughes's own decisions as to which of his poems he most wanted to preserve and reprint. It contains not only selections from his published books (including private publication), but also poems that either had never been published before or had appeared only in periodicals.

Here are reflected the rhythms of jazz, the blues, and spirituals. Arna Bontemps has called Langston Hughes the "original jazz poet," and it is worth noting that Hughes in his last years often read his poetry to jazz accompaniment. But there is more in these poems than jazz, its rhythms and its significance. Here, too, are the travail, the joys and accomplishments, the wide-eyed wonder and bitter realizations of a transplanted race. Here, most important of all, are the affirmations and speech of a true poet. Primarily a lyricist, Langston Hughes learned how to speak with intensity of the things that mattered to him, the human factors that he understood and appreciated, whether in praise, in condemnation, or in sheer song....

Although best known as a poet, Langston Hughes was also the author of two novels that richly evoke the black experience in America. First published in 1930 and 1958, respectively, Not without Laughter and Tambourines to Glory reflect the early and late vision of one of the twentieth century's most distinguished men of letters. In his introduction to this combined edition of both novels. Dolan Hubbard addresses Hughes's growing influence on American letters and reveals how a black aesthetic tradition shaped his art and his imagination. Hughes shows us how the discourse of black America informs and alters our understanding of cultural history and of aesthetic values. In Not without Laughter, he movingly tells the story of a black boy growing into manhood in a small Kansas town during the early twentieth century and his experiences with race, family, school, work, music, and religion. His grandmother, a humble religious woman, struggles to keep her family, three daughters and a son-in-law together, on the meager income she earns by taking in washing. Set in Harlem, the center of Hughes's spiritual universe, Tambourines to Glory is an urban folk melodrama based on the black fusion of Christian hymns and spirituals with the blues. This comic novel captures the spirit of newly transplanted southern blacks who bend the alien rhythms of the city to the gospel sound. In 1963, Hughes would adapt his novel to a long-running play by the same name. This volume of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes is a testament to a man whose life and writings have had a profound influence on world literature and is proof that Hughes's immense talent embraced not only poetry, but fiction as well....

Illus. in black-and-white. This classic collection of poetry is available in

a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after

The Dream Keeper was first published. In a larger format, featuring

Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational

message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932. "There's no

better way to show kids what poetry is about than to share this

collection."--Booklist.




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In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s....

Illus. in black-and-white. This classic collection of poetry is available in

a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after

The Dream Keeper was first published. In a larger format, featuring

Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational

message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932. "There's no

better way to show kids what poetry is about than to share this

collection."--Booklist.




...

This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963--the most comprehensive available--showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.
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A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection. 15,000 first printing....

The first three volumes of Missouri's landmark Collected Works of Langston Hughes comprise all of his published poetry. Although he worked in a variety of forms, Hughes was above all a poet. From 1921, when his first poem. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," appeared in a national magazine, until 1967, when his last volume appeared shortly after his death, he remained faithful to his central goal - to be a poet of the African American and American experience, creating verse that honored the culture of black American and the ideals of the nation. Volume 1 includes the complete texts of Hughes's first book, The Weary Blues (1926), and his second, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as other poems published by him during and after the Harlem Renaissance. The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steephed in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then, in the 1930s especially, came the radical poetry included in Dear Lovely Death (1934) and A New Song (1938). For example, "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let American Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression....

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."
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This generous volume is a genuine literary milestone, the first comprehensive collection of the verse of a writer who has been called both the poet laureate of African America and our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman. The book contains 860 poems, including all the verse that Hughes published during his lifetime, and nearly 300 that have never before appeared in book form....

Volume 2 includes the books Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943), Fields of Wonder (1947), and One-Way Ticket (1948). Starting around 1940, Hughes turned away from radical socialism toward strong support for the national war effort; as a poet, he resumed his experimentation in the blues, as Shakespeare in Harlem briliantly demonstrates. With this change in political emphasis came a renewed commitment to the achievement of civil rights for blacks, which Jim Crow's Last Stand vigorously asserts. In contrast, Fields of Wonder was Hughes's only book devoted entirely to lyric verse; but the next volume, One-Way Ticket, restored the balance that was essential to his creative expression as a poet....

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.

“Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature . . . a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

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

The last and most explicitly political book of verse by one of the great poets of our century. Published just before his death in 1967, Hughes' sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, but always powerful poems address the racial politics of the 1960s....

This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963--the most comprehensive available--showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.
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Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribue to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today....

Volume 3 collects the poems of the last period of Hughes's life. Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) brilliantly fused the modernist dissonances of bebop jazz with his perception of Harlem life as both a triumph of hope and a potential crisis ("What happens to a dream deferred?"). In the tumultuous following years, he refused to relinquish the mantle of the poet, as may be seen in his inspired last two books of verse, Ask Your Mama (1961) and The Panther and the Lash (1967). The former demonstrate Hughes's continuing alertness to the significance of black music as a guide to American reality, here, avant-garde jazz rhythms and allusions fueled an intensity of language that predicted the cultural upheavals of the sixties and seventies. Hughes's last volume, combining old and new poems, emphasized the struggle for civil rights in the face of reactionary defiance, on the one hand, and the volatility of Black Power, on the other. Vigorous and versatile to the end, Hughes concluded his career as he had begun it a master poet dedicated to observing and celebrating African American culture in its full complexity....