Vintage Hughes
The latest Vintage Reader caps a generous sampling of the African American writer's poems with three sharp stories fromThe Ways of White Folks(1934). The selection of poems-- spanning from the career-launching "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in the NAACP magazineThe Crisiswhen Hughes was 19, to his highly politicized and polemical last collection,The Panther and the Lash(1967)-- emphasizes Hughes as, first, the voice of Harlem and, later, of African American consciousness. Fortunately, the selection is seasoned with antiwar poems that know no ethnicity, such as "Comment on War" ("Let us kill off youth / For the sake oftruth") and "War" ("The face of war is my face. / The face of war is your face"). As those poems' opening lines demonstrate, throughout his career Hughes' poetic style was a model of clarity achieved through simple, accurate diction. His prose was similarly styled, and that gives the heartbreaking, enraging incidents of the three stories in this book biblical power and poignancy.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved