Langston Hughes: 24 books

This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the iconic and beloved Langston Hughes. It offers a life in letters that showcases his many struggles as well as his memorable achievements. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes’s...

The Short Stories of Langston Hughes 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...

Langston Hughes, one of America's greatest writers, was an innovator of jazz poetry and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance whose poems and plays resonate widely today. Accessible, personal, and inspirational, Hughes’s poems portray the African American community in struggle in the context of a turbulent...

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.  The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington";...

“Dream Variation,” one of Langston Hughes's most celebrated poems, about the dream of a world free of discrimination and racial prejudice, is now a picture book stunningly illustrated by Daniel Miyares, the acclaimed creator of Float. To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl...

Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic,...

According to Wikipedia: "James Mercer Langston Hughes, best known as Langston Hughes, (February 1, 1902 May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. Hughes is known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance."

Langston Hughes's most beloved character comes back to life in this extraordinary collection Langston Hughes is best known as a poet, but he was also a prolific writer of theater, autobiography, and fiction. None of his creations won the hearts and minds of his readers as did Jesse B. Semple,...

I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. — Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak”   From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America’s acknowledged poet of color, the first to commemorate...

Finally available in trade paperback, Langston Hughes’s breezy parable of good and evil, friendship and betrayal, is an unforgettable portrait of 1950s Harlem and two women called to the pulpit for very different reasons. For every bustling jazz joint that opened in Korean War–era Harlem,...

Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening “Proem” (prologue poem)—“I am a Negro: / Black as the night is...

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...

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection   Colonel Norwood is the despotic owner of Big House Plantation, where he lives alone but for the occasional company of his black mistress, Coralee Lewis. But this summer, a new breeze is blowing in with the warm Georgia wind—his son is coming...

A shining star of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Langston Hughes is one of modern literature's most revered African-American authors. Although best known for his poetry, Hughes produced in Not Without Laughter a powerful and pioneering classic novel. A fascinating chronicle of a family's joys and...