Langston Hughes Books

The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a 'poem' about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city. Hughes's description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem, expressed here through Hughes's prose. In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in The Sweet Flypaper of Life. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history of this book

Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.

Celebrate 100 years of Langston Hughes's powerful poetry. A Coretta Scott King Honor Award recipient, Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes includes 26 of the poet's most influential pieces, including: "Mother to Son"; "My People"; "Words Like Freedom"; "I, Too"; and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"--Hughes's first published piece, which was originally released in June 1921. This collection is curated and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, two leading poetry experts. It also features gallery-quality art by Benny Andrews and a new foreword by Renée Watson, a Newbery Honor Award recipient and founder of the I, Too Arts Collective.

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and ‘30s.One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.Stories included in this collection:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"

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 been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

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. This indispensable volume of letters between Hughes and four leftist confidants sheds light on his life and politics.

Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career.The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life."The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America."  It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

VINTAGE CLASSICS' HARLEM RENAISSANCE SERIES Celebrating the finest works of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most important Black arts movements in modern history. 'White peoples maybe mistreats you an' hates you, but when you hates 'em back, you's de one what's hurted, 'cause hate makes yo' heart ugly - that's all it does' Sandy's in the fifth grade when he's forced to sit on the back row away from his white classmates and denied entry to a new amusement park. His grandmother, who is raising him alongside his mother and aunt, tells him that love is the only thing to make room for in his heart. But it's Sandy's discovery of literature that inspires him to continue his education and make sense of the unjust world he inhabits in the debut novel from one of the foremost pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance. '[Hughes] gives his readers... a guide for careful consideration of the lives of everyday black people. Such a guide is still useful to readers and writers today. Perhaps now more than ever' Angela Flournoy, New York Times

"A useful, simplified introduction to the history of jazz and its techniques, with capsule profiles of musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, all by one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance and African-American letters". PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. Illustrated throughout by Cliff Roberts' stylized bebop drawings.