A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes

A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes STEVEN C. TRACY, Editor OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Langston Hughes The Historical Guides to American Authors is an interdisciplinary, historically sensitive series that combines close attention to the United States’ most widely read and studied authors with a strong sense of time, place, and history. Placing each writer in the context of the vi- brant relationship between literature and society, volumes in this series contain historical essays written on subjects of contemporary social, political, and cultural relevance. Each volume also includes a capsule biography and illustrated chronology detailing important cultural events as they coincided with the author’s life and works, while pho- tographs and illustrations dating from the period capture the flavor of the author’s time and social milieu. Equally accessible to students of literature and of life, the volumes offer a complete and rounded picture of each author in his or her America. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman Edited by David S. Reynolds A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson Edited by Joel Myerson A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne Edited by Larry Reynolds A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau Edited by William E. Cain A Historical Guide to Mark Twain Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton Edited by Carol J. Singley A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes Edited by Steven C. Tracy A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes f . 1 3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. Madison Avenue, New York, New York www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A historical guide to Langston Hughes / edited by Steven C. Tracy. p. cm.— (Historical guides to American authors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---; --- (pbk.) . Hughes, Langston, –—Criticism and interpretation—Handbooks, manuals, etc. African Americans in literature—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Tracy, Steven C. (Steven Carl), – II. Series. PS.U Z ′.—dc The following publishers have generously given permission to use quotations from copyrighted works. From Dictionary of Literary Biography v. : Afro-American Writers, by R. Baxter Miller, Vol. , Gale Group, © Gale Group. Reprinted by permission of the Gale Group. Portions of “Langston Hughes and Afro-American Vernacular Music,” subsequently revised, appeared in the following: “Poetry, Blues, and Gospel” in C. James Trotman, editor, Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence; and “William Carlos Williams and a Magazine of New Rhythms,” originally published in the William Carlos Williams Review , no. (Fall ); reprinted with permission. From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, copyright © by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Cathy, Michelle, and Michael This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments he scholarsf who have undertaken to contribute to this vol- Tume are all committed to recognizing the seminal contributions of Langston Hughes to the American, Afro-American, and world literary traditions. Their work in this volume helps to keep the name and work of Langston Hughes alive and before the critics, students, and readers who will establish the literary canons of the future. To James de Jongh, Dolan Hubbard, Joyce A. Joyce, R. Baxter Miller, and James Smethurst I offer my sincerest thanks for their participation in this project. No one who discusses the work of Langston Hughes can af- ford to do so without recourse to the important and inspiring work of Arnold Rampersad, whose scholarship laid and con- tinues to lay the groundwork for what we as Hughes scholars produce. When I write of Hughes, it is generally with some work of Professor Rampersad’s by my side for background, veri- fication, consultation, and insight. It is also important to acknowledge the important work of the critics Donald Dickinson, James Emanuel, Onwuchekwa Jemie, Therman B. O’Daniel, and Jean Wagner, as well as the contributions of Patricia Willis, at the Beinecke Library, and Emery Wimbish, at Lincoln University. Personally, my introduction to the serious study of Langston Hughes came at the instruction of Angelene Jamison-Hall, Acknowledgments Arlene A. Elder, and Wayne C. Miller, each of whom offered me important insights on how to approach the literature of Ameri- cans, and of Edgar Slotkin, whose courses in folklore and other subjects never failed to inspire. That instruction came to first- published fruition with a paper on Hughes generated for Robert D. Arner’s “American Humor” graduate course, which found its way into the CLA Journal. I offer special thanks to these teachers for their passion, guidance, and support. Being in a wonderful Afro-American studies department at the University of Massa- chusetts, Amherst, offers the greatest opportunities to carry on scholarship in a community of top scholars committed to Du Boisian ideals of teaching, scholarship, and service, so every day in this environment is a loving and instructive interdisciplinary immersion that makes my job much easier and enjoyable. Special thanks to Ernest Allen for his invaluable assistance with consoli- dating various diskettes and programs into one manageable manuscript. And, of course, without my parents to start me off on this chosen course and my wife and children to sustain me, I wouldn’t even be here. To all of these people, I owe my sincerest gratitude. Special thanks also go to Elissa Morris, at Oxford University Press, for welcoming me to and guiding me through this project, and to Jeremy Lewis and all those at Oxford who have helped me with the production of this book. Linda Seidman, of Special Col- lections and Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, helped immeasurably with her assistance with the photo archives there. And, finally, or course, we must acknowledge the genius of Langston Hughes, who avoided pretentiousness and snobbery and willful difficulty in the spirit and name of poetry, America, and freedom. May his books, recordings, and electronic media keep his words in the air about us. Contents Abbreviations xi Introduction: Hughes in Our Time Steven C. Tracy Langston Hughes, –: A Brief Biography R. Baxter Miller The Poet Speaks of Places: A Close Reading of Langston Hughes’s Literary Use of Place James de Jongh Langston Hughes and Afro-American Vernacular Music Steven C. Tracy Hughes and Twentieth-Century Genderracial Issues Joyce A. Joyce Contents The Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes from the Popular Front to Black Power James Smethurst Illustrated Chronology Bibliographical Essay Dolan Hubbard Contributors Index Abbreviations CP The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Ram- persad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, . FBJ The First Book of Jazz. New York: Franklin Watts, . FP Five Plays by Langston Hughes. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, . IWW I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Knopf, . NWL Not Without Laughter. New York: Knopf, . RS The Return of Simple. Ed. Akiba Sullivan Harper. New York: Hill and Wang, . STW Simple Takes a Wife. New York: Simon and Schuster, . SUS Simple’s Uncle Sam. New York: Hill and Wang, . TBOS The Best of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang, . TBS The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, . TDK The Dream Keeper. New York: Knopf, . TWW The Ways of White Folks. New York: Knopf, . This page intentionally left blank Langston Hughes This page intentionally left blank Introduction Hughes in Our Time Steven C. Tracy O sancta simplicitas! O holy simplicity! —John Huss I love to hear my baby call my name, She calls so easy and so doggone plain. —blues lyric f “So what are you going to do the other twelve weeks of the se- mester?” cracked one of my colleagues ten years ago with hearty laughs all around, in response to my announced intention to teach a fourteen-week course on the works of Langston Hughes. The remark and the response to it revealed not only an ignorance of the extent of Hughes’s work—his output was voluminous— but also something more insidious and troublesome. There is the notion among some literary academics that Hughes is, well, too simple, too obvious, too shallow. What can one say about such plain and straightforward writing beyond, perhaps, paraphrases or expressions of sympathy? “We want befuddlement, prolixity, circumlocution, obscurity,” they say. “We want not-Hughes.” Part of the problem is that the response to American litera- Introduction ture in the twentieth century was largely conditioned by the aes- thetics of the High Modernists. Emerging early in the twentieth century with their deep feelings of dislocation and discontinuity, they attempted to generate an aesthetic that reflected their feelings about their industrialized, materialistic, post–World War I world, employing the literary implications of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century scientific and technological advances. They felt that the only way to reflect and respond to the contemporary world of complexity, paradox, and bewilderment was to bewilder their readers with symbolic, linguistic, and typographi- cal complexities and paradoxes that would force a simultaneous engagement with the energy, intellect, and emotion of literature and life.

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