And neither then nor in these years since, as Langston Hughes has continued to produce sensitive and thoughtful work in prose and verse, has the full course of his extraordinary career been generally guessed. Now that it is here before us, the noteworthy quality of the poet's latest book passes well beyond its content of remarkable situation and incident. Langston Hughes's autobiography is the product and portrait of a very unusual spirit, in its narrative of crowded happenings and contrasts and the envisioning of a strange and significant time. The book can be followed through with fascination as a success story and chronicle of adventure, full of living individuals and colorful scenes. But its profound quality and lasting worth are to be found in the fact that from first to last, through all these and other experiences and observations, it remains both sensitive and poised, candid and reticent, realistic and unembittered.
Life is a big sea full of many fish.
I let down my nets and pull. It is a poet who is the fisher, and the poet's miracle of combining subjectivity with detachment is in the gathering of the nets. He was reading French before he was 17, and he wanted to write about his own people, and make them live, in stories as realistic as Maupassant's. He knew a good deal of Spanish and German, too, before he was 20, and he had had a year at Columbia. But the memories clung.