San Antonio College Library

"Known by many as the "poet laureate of the American Negro" and by others as "Shakespeare in Harlem," Langston Hughes is one of America's most read and quoted poets. In the Preface to this important and unique collection of reviews and essays, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes: "Between 1926, when he published his pioneering The Weary Blues, to 1967, the year of his death, when he published The Panther and the Lash, Hughes would write sixteen...

This book is the first comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of the writing of Langston Hughes from 1926 until his death in 1967. Most of the reviews have never before been listed in a Hughes bibliography, and many of the reviews are reprinted from hard-to-find newspapers and periodicals. Their collection here, by replacing myths with the actual historical record, will make possible a reassessment of Hughes's initial critical reception....

Perhaps the single best-known and most highly regarded African-American writer of his time, Langston Hughes (1902-1967) has left a profound mark on American letters. Taking the environment of urban blacks, Hughes captured in verse and prose its joys and pains, bringing a new realism to the subject. His language, while unadorned in style, remained spirited and true to colloquial speech, and his work was among the first by a black man to gain a multi-racial...