SELECTED LETTERS OF LANGSTON HUGHES

The renowned poet’s life revealed in letters.

A star of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-1967) published poetry, fiction, humor, books for young people, biographies and autobiographies, anthologies, and assorted works of history and translation. He also wrote thousands of letters, from which Rampersad (Humanities, Emeritus/Stanford Univ.; Ralph Ellison, 2007, etc.) and Roessel (Greek/Stockton Coll. of New Jersey; co-editor: Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes, 2013, etc.) have made a discerning selection—including several disarmingly candid drafts—to offer a vivid portrait of a man sometimes cowed by self-doubt and vulnerability, sometimes given to outbursts of bravura, always eager for adventure and always short of money. In the 1930s, his youthful socialist sympathies transformed into passionate radicalism. He cherished friendships, as letters to Arna Bontemps, Carl Van Vechten and Countee Cullen attest, and he was quick to encourage other writers, including Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker. As a young writer himself, he could be self-deprecating: He felt timid about meeting editor and professor Alain Locke, he told Cullen, “because I know he’d find me terribly stupid.” When he was 25, Hughes was taken up by Charlotte Osgood Mason, an elderly white philanthropist who offered him a monthly stipend to support his writing and insisted on being called “Godmother.” Hughes loved Mrs. Mason “as a son loves his mother,” Rampersad writes. When Mason flared up angrily at what she saw as indolence, Hughes felt desolate: “I am humbly deeply sorry,” he wrote, but he confessed, “I cannot write at all on any sort of pre-arranged schedule.” An intrepid traveler, Hughes saw the world; championed by Van Vechten and his publisher Blanche Knopf, he socialized with celebrity artists and writers. Yet all the while, he took advice offered by Vachel Lindsay to be “wary of lionizers.”

A privileged perspective on the man and his art.