Langston Hughes in Context

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Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

• Features chapters on Langston Hughes complicated navigation of the Popular Front, Cold War, and Civil Rights eras
• Provides essays on Hughes translations giving readers a sense of the international networks he created among poets, and those that keep versions of his legacy alive in the present
• Features essays on Hughes as a translator, providing readers with a sense of world Hughes inhabited