Hughes, Langston

101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar--. [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music--. This book is a glorious revelation."--Boston Globe

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.

Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.  The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night."  They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture.  They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."

The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America."  It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Not Without Laughter (Thrift Edition)

The Ways of White Folks: Stories

In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s.

The Short Stories of Langston Hughes

Sometimes called the Poet Laureate of Black America, Langston Hughes was also an accomplished writer of fiction, with a novel and several collections of stories to his credit. This collection brings together nearly 50 of Hughes's best stories. Many are drawn from three earlier collections, but some are between book covers for the first time. Of special note for anyone interested in Hughes's development as a writer are three stories written when Hughes was a high school student in Cleveland.

Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure (Dover Thrift Editions)

The Big Sea: An Autobiography (American Century Series)

Black Voices (Signet Classics)

Featuring poetry, fiction, autobiography and literary criticism, this is a comprehensive and vital collection featuring the work of the major black voices of a century. An unparalleled important classic anthology with timeless appeal.

The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1899-1967: The Classic Anthology