num_pages: 281
description: To start with, one must know what Langston Hughes was: an American and black. And for the Afro-American, life in the land where "white is right" has always been different. It is this difference that Langston Hughes's poetry and life illuminate. He listened and heard; saw and understood; knew and remembered. A few years after his first book, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926, he was the poet laureate of his people. Their life was his life, and he wrote about it as it was. And Milton Melzer has written about Langston Hughes' life as it was. It was a colorful life - moving from boyhood i Kansas to young manhood in Harlem, washing in a Paris cafe, from a freighter cruising off Dakar to the Spanish civil war, from movie-making in Moscow to the way around the world It was a life filled with the speech and music of his people - the beat of jazz, the wail of the blues - and always the basic theme was freedom. For what other theme can a black poet choose?In this book we see the growth of a poet and a man, written with the warmth and affection that Langston Hughes drew from everyone who knew him. Here is the young man exploring the burning vigor of the Black Renaissance; here is Simple, speaking his mind o the problems of "white folks, colored folks, and just plain folks."Langston Hughes knew the soul of his people, and set it down in words for all to hear. His career is full of meaning or Americans, and in telling his story Milton Melzer has captured the man and the spirit of his times.
language: English
title: Langston Hughes: A Biography
titlecomplete: Langston Hughes: A Biography
characters: Langston Hughes
genres: Biography, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 33
awards: awardedAt: -31507200000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Children's Books
publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell Company