Langston Hughes

A collection of sixty-six poems, selected by the author for young readers, including lyrical poems, songs, and blues, many exploring the black experience.

For every jazz joint that opened in Korean War-era Harlem, a new church seemed to spring up. This novel introduces you to an unlikely team behind a church whose rock was the curb at 126th and Lenox. Essie Belle and Laura live in tenement flats, on public relief. Essie wants to somehow earn enough money to reunite with her daughter and provide her with a nice home; Laura loves young men, mink coats, and fine Scotch. The friends decide to use a thrift-store...

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books
From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, works-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.
Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was

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First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

Rediscover the great Harlem Renaissance poet’s first and only novel—an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale about an African American family set in the Midwest at the dawn of World War I
Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter is drawn in part from the author’s own recollections of youth and early manhood. “I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West,” he later explained...

A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was the first to use his poetry to reflect the real daily lives of average Black people. This collection celebrates Black pride and contains messages of hope and optimism from the 1920s. Langston Hughes is often referred to as the Poet Laureate of African-American experience. The writer featured themes of cultural heritage, racial discrimination, and optimism in his poetry. He used his work...

Langston Hughes's most beloved character comes back to life in this extraordinary collection Langston Hughes is best known as a poet, but he was also a prolific writer of theater, autobiography, and fiction. None of his creations won the hearts and minds of his readers as did Jesse B. Semple, better known as "Simple." Simple speaks as an Everyman for African Americans in Uncle Sam's America. With great wit, he expounds on topics as varied as women,...

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 Mule-Bone”, written by renowned African American poet Langston Hughes, is a satirical play that engages the complexities of race relations and the significance of the cultural heritage of African Americans in the early 20th century. The play follows two friends, Dave and Bones, who enter into a heated debate about which one of them will be able to buy a mule at an auction.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.
His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation...