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Langston Hughes
W. Jason Miller
Reaktion Books, 2020
As the first black author in America to make his living exclusively by writing, Langston Hughes inspired a generation of writers and activists. One of the pioneers of jazz poetry, Hughes led the Harlem Renaissance, while Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked Hughes’s signature metaphor of dreaming in his speeches. In this new biography, W. Jason Miller illuminates Hughes’s status as an international literary figure through a compelling look at the relationship between his extraordinary life and his canonical works. Drawing on unpublished letters and manuscripts, Miller addresses Hughes’s often ignored contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as his complex and well-guarded sexuality, and repositions him as a writer rather than merely the most beloved African American poet of the twentieth century.
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Langston Hughes and the Blues
Steven C. Tracy
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The shades and structures of the blues had an immense impact on the poetry of Langston Hughes. Steven C. Tracy provides a cultural context for Hughes’s work while revealing how Hughes mined Black oral and literary traditions to create his poetry. Comparing Hughes’s poems to blues texts, Tracy reveals how Hughes’s experimental forms reflect the poetics, structures, rhythms, and musical techniques of the music. Tracy also offers a discography of recordings by the artists--Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others--who most influenced the poet.
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Langston Hughes and the *Chicago Defender*
Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62
Langston Hughes. Edited by Christopher C. De Santis
University of Illinois Press, 1995
Langston Hughes is well known as a poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, communist sympathizer, and brilliant member of the Harlem Renaissance. He has been referred to as the "Dean of Black Letters" and the "poet low-rate of Harlem."

But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose.

This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.

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New World Maker
Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes
Ryan James Kernan, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In an ambitious reappraisal of Langston Hughes’s work and legacy, Ryan James Kernan reads Hughes’s political poetry in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora. Drawing on heretofore unearthed archival evidence, Kernan shows how Hughes mined his engagements with the poetics of Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, Regino Pedroso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico García Lorca, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as translations of his own poetry, to fashion a radical poetics that engaged Black left internationalist concerns. As he follows Hughes from Harlem to Havana, Moscow, Madrid, and finally to Dakar, Kernan reveals how the writer’s identity and aesthetic were translated within these leftist geographies and metropoles, by others but also collaboratively. As Kernan argues, we cannot know Hughes without knowing him in translation.
 
Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes’s work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes’s creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.
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The Political Plays of Langston Hughes
Introductions and Analyses by Susan Duffy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes’ dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963).

Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes’ most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes’ remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes’ other more influential and studied works.

The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes’ plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer, a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage.

By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.

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Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
Jonathan Scott
University of Missouri Press, 2007
One of the foremost African American writers of his generation, Langston Hughes waged a tireless campaign against racial oppression that defied the anticommunist currents of cold war America. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes examines his writing during this period to show that his approach to the main philosophical currents of the era was original, dynamic, and systematic in ways that most scholars have yet to appreciate.

Jonathan Scott has written the first book-length study to analyze the extraordinary range of Hughes’s creative output, showing that his unassailable reputation as one of America’s finest “folk poets” barely scratches the surface of his oeuvre. Scott offers a robust account of the relations between Hughes and political activism to show that Hughes’s direct involvement with the U.S. socialist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was largely responsible for the variety of his writing. Scott also contends that the goal of overthrowing white oppression produced a “socialist joy” that would express itself repeatedly in Hughes’s work during the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s and 1960s.

In his provocative study, Scott explores four areas of Hughes’s intellectual work: his relationship with Afro-Caribbean arts, Soviet Russia, and the Harlem Renaissance; his postwar newspaper writing for the African American press; his extensive cultural work as an anthologist; and his writings for young people. Through these analyses, Scott proposes the concept of “red, white, and black” as an alternative paradigm for appreciating Hughes in particular and the American scene in general. 

Scott views Hughes not simply as a great author but as an American working-class intellectual trickster whose eccentric projects require a redefinition of the very concept of authorship. By focusing on Hughes’s intellectual method, Scott also contests the notion of reducing all African Americans to one undifferentiated social status beneath that of any class within the white oppressing group—a hallmark of racial oppression that has diminished, in the U.S. academy, Hughes’s international status.

As Scott persuasively argues, it is only through an understanding of Hughes’s literary method that we can undertake a thorough account of his prolific production during the cold war era. His book situates Hughes’s life and work in their proper contexts, both reconfirming Hughes’s reputation as an intellectual of the American Left and establishing his long-denied place in American studies as the most well-rounded writer of his time.
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