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Langston Hughes |
Langston Hughes was struggling as a young poet in Washington, working as a hotel busboy when he saw Vachel Lindsay come into the dining room. Hughes slipped a copy of his poems under Lindsay’s plate and that night the famous poet announced that he had discovered a new talent. Hughes’ career was launched.
Over the next forty years, he wrote poems, novels, short stories, and essays, a sustained and prodigious output that established him as the leading African American writer in the country. His poetry had the jump and jostle of a Harlem jazz joint while his essays coolly wrote the new rules, not only for the Harlem Renaissance but for the new Black literature. As a young man writing about Harlem lowlife, he was too radical. As an old man in the age of Black Power, he was too tame. Whatever he did, the critics ignored him until, to everyone’s surprise, he had become as much a part of American literature as Whitman.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |