Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
Suitcase in Harlem
By Darryl Pinckney
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America
by Arnold Rampersad
Oxford University Press, 468 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II, 1941–1967: I Dream a World
by Arnold Rampersad
Oxford University Press, 512 pp., $24.95
Langston Hughes survived the Harlem Renaissance, unlike most of his peers of the 1920s, who either died young or faded away after the stock market crashed. 'A literary sharecropper,' as he called himself, Hughes sustained through four decades a career as a professional black writer, the first since Charles Chesnutt, who published his short stories and novels around the turn of the century. Hughes made do with modest advances, fees from a mostly black reading and lecture circuit, and anything in between. He produced fifteen volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, two volumes of autobiography, fifteen plays, several librettos, scripts, essays, songs, translations, anthologies, children's stories, biographies and histories for the young, and two decades' worth of a weekly newspaper column.[1] When he died in 1967, at the age of sixty-five, the 'bard of Harlem,' the 'Poet Laureate of the Negro People,' was as much a part of Afro-American culture as the word soul.
Review, 7912 words
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