Selected Letters of Langston Hughes

Abstract

Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, pp. 423, ISBN: 0375413790) edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If he were alive today, Langston Hughes would have tried to write this book review as quickly as possible. He had bills to pay (and loans from friends to pay back), so he leapt into the plays, novels and short stories he had to write. Meanwhile, an ever-mounting pile of correspondence awaited him to sort and answer--which he did, often into the late night and early morning. Luckily for Hughes aficionados, that lifetime's worth of letters were regularly shipped, from 1940 until his 1967 death at the age of 65, to Yale University's James Weldon Johnson Collection. (The idea for the collection was Carl Van Vechten's, the man history identifies as the white champion of the Harlem Renaissance.) It's from this massive Hughes output--thousands of letters that date back to 1921, letters that eventually filled 671 boxes--that the reader can see the artist at work. It's almost mostly just his work schedule--with a smattering of self-opining and sometimes-frank opinions of his fellow artists thrown in--that's absorbed from this comprehensive survey. Hughes's definitive biographer Arnold Rampersad and literature scholar David Roessel, with help from independent scholar Christa Fratantoro, chose the letters that give as much insight as the often-intangible Hughes chooses to reveal. His most frequent communications, according to this assemblage, were to his literary agent, Maxim Lieber, his publisher Blanche Knopf (the matron of the publishing house that is celebrating its centennial with this book and a re-issue of Hughes' first-and-still-classic 1926 poetry collection The Weary Blues), his friend and quasi-patron Noel Sullivan, and his best pal and writing partner, Arna Bontemps. In this book, which mightily struggles to be more than a work ledger, Hughes is almost constantly at work, writing anything from quickie children's books to newspaper columns to his two autobiographies, the 1940's The Big Sea: An Autobiography and the 1956's I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. Sadly for the general reader but semi-happily for Hughes, the master poet had a near-obsession with writing a successful stage musical, which would have given him the financial security that eluded him his entire struggling-against-being-a-vagabond life. His attempts to fight being fleeced by racist white producers and playwrights are as tedious as they are outrageous. Hughes kept everything that interested him. He followed Black newspapers and magazines with great care, and kept track what those periodicals were saying about Black artists, especially him. Periodicals were Hughes' lifeblood: he sold many short stories, poems and essays to Black magazines such as The Crisis and Phylon and white magazines such as Esquire. …