Langston Hughes
For Further Reading and Study: The best biography of Hughes is the huge, 2-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986-88) by Arnold Rampersad, a truly masterful biography. It replaces earlier biographies by James Haskins (Always Movin' On: The Life of Langston Hughes [1976]) and by Milton Meltzer (Langston Hughes: A Biography [1968]). Be sure to consult Hughes's own two-part autobiography, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956). It's instruct ive to go back to James Emanuel's little Twayne book, Langston Hughes (1967), just to see how far criticism of Hughes's work has come in the past thirty-plus years.
There is finally a full and reliable collection of Hughes's poetry, masterfully edited by Arnold Rampersad: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994). It is a big volume well worth owning.
Some of the best criticism on Hughes consists of essays rather than books, and some of the best essays are gathered in various collections: one of the first is Edward Mullen's Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (1986); C. James Trotman edited Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence (1995); Harold Bloom edited Langston Hughes (1989), with twelve essays of varying quality; and Henry Louis Gates and K.A. Appiah edited Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), the most interesting collection so far. A journal, The Langston Hughes Review, which began publication in 1982, contains some important articles among many minor ones. George Hutchinson has written an interesting study of Hughes's relationship to Walt Whitman in an essay in Robert K. Martin's The Continuing Influence of Walt Whitman (1993).
Among book length studies worth consulting are Faith Berry's Langston Hughes: Before and After Harlem (1983), R. Baxter Miller's The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989), Steven Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues (1988), and Pat Bonner's Sassy Jazz and Slo' Draggin' Blues: Music in the Poetry of Langston Hughes (1992). These last two books indicate the growing importance of blues and jazz history to the understanding of Hughes.
The only collection of Hughes's letters so far is Arna Bontemps's Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967 (1980). Peter Mandelik compiled A Concordance to the Poetry of Langst on Hughes (1975), and Donald Dickinson in 1972 and Thomas Mikolyzk in 1990 published "bio-bibliographies" of Hughes.
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Check the Academy of American Poets site on Hughes, with good links to the still-modest offerings on the web, available here.
Lots of commentary, biography, and external links on the Modern American Poetry site, available here.
And the Voices and Visions series, whose programs we have been watching this term, has a Hughes site, available here.