THE LIFE OF LANGSTON HUGHES
Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America
Arnold Rampersad
Oxford University Press, 1986
468 pp., $22.95 cloth
Eight years before his death in 1967, Langston Hughes culled his life's labor to extract the poems for which he wished to be remembered. James Baldwin, the rising star of black letters, reviewed The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes for the New York Times. His verdict was harsh: "Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts - and depressed that he has done so little with them....This book contains a great deal which a more disciplined poet would have thrown into the wastebasket."
Hailed before World War II as America's greatest black writer, Hughes had watched his fame erode over the years. The beginning of that slide from prominence can be pegged most precisely to 1940, when Hughes published his autobiography The Big Sea in the same year that Richard Wright astonished the literary world with Native Son. With one book, Wright snatched the mantle Hughes considered rightfully his own.
A dozen years later, Hughes had to defer to another competitor, this time to Ralph Ellison, who in 1952 published The Invisible Man, a novel most critics still consider the greatest book by a black American.
Hughes enjoyed a certain vogue in the late 1960s and 1970s as a writer who had pioneered the idea of grounding racial pride in black folk culture, and one recalls black schoolchildren reciting:
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need
I live here, too,
I want freedom
Just as you.
Many of Hughes' books remain in print, and Random House does not maintain his Selected Poems in a mass market edition out of philanthropic devotion to black literature. Somebody must buy those books and, one assumes, read them. Yet Hughes no longer holds a commanding position in American literature.
Perhaps Arnold Rampersad's splendid biography, the first volume of which carries his subject to 1941, will revive interest in Hughes' life and work. If it fails to do so, the fault will not be Rampersad's, for he is the sort of biographer everyone would hope to have: judicious, fair-minded, comprehensive, and wary of pet theories and tenuous speculations.
Rampersad interweaves the life and work so deftly and seamlessly that it is difficult to separate them. One's respect, admiration, and compassion for Hughes - feelings evoked by his kindness and decency, his eagerness to advance the careers of other writers, his childlike ingenuousness, his touching search for love and friendship, his struggle to wrest a livelihood from his art - tend to color an assessment of his poetry, fiction, drama, and other
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