Langston Hughes
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.
Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade—Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet—at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."
Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive
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...
Hear rare recordings from five of the most-respected African American poets reading their own works: Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers; Arna Bontemps, Nocturne At Bethesda; Countee Cullen, Heritage; Gwendolyn Brooks, The Vacant Lot; and Sonia Sanchez, Black Magic.
7) Three Poets of the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Countee Cullen
The intellectual and cultural revival of African-American arts and politics in the 1920s and 1930s was centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.
Here are poems from three major contributors to that rebirth: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Copper Sun by Countee Cullen, delivered by three multiaward–winning narrators.