The 1619 Project (Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein) opens with an epigraph from Langston Hughes, his poem “American Heartbreak 1619”:

I am the American heartbreak–
The rock on which freedom
Stumped its toe–
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago

He’s such a prominent figure that I felt like I “found” him as often while browsing as when seeking out his work. In Young Gifted and Black (edited by Jamia Wilson and Andrea Pippins), for instance, his image appears with a brief bio and a quotation: “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” (See the illustration alongside.)

In Renegades (2021), he’s referenced in one of the Obama speeches, a draft with handwritten edits, delivered in Selma on March 7, 2015: “We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of, who ‘build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how’.”

In Bruce Kayton’s Radical Walking Tours of New York City (3rd edition, 2016), he describes stopping in front of the Schomburg Center to detail some of the impressive figures of the Harlem Renaissance—including Langston Hughes—and having a women express disbelief that all of these individuals were Black.

On his first day in Harlem, Kayton specifies, Langston Hughes climbed the steps of this building, in 1921. Outside the Langston Hughes auditorium in the building, in the tiles, there’s a tribute to his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and a timeline of the lives of both Hughes and Schomburg, christened using water from all the rivers depicted in the artwork and, beneath, Langston Hughes’ ashes are interred.

Another stop on Kayton’s two-hour-long Harlem tour is the YMCA at 181 West 135th Street, where Hughes stayed for $7/week when he came to NYC to study at Columbia University. (At the YMCA across the street, built a decade later, across the street, Malcolm stayed on his first night as a resident of the city—although he stayed there previously, when working as a porter, between shifts.)

Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variation” poem from 1926 is featured in That Is My Dream! (2017) illustrated by Daniel Miyares.

The illustrations are beautiful, soft tones and gentle scenes. It’s the kind of storybook that you can imagine reading at any time of day, including bedtime (this, coming from a very picky bedtime story reader, past and present).

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done….

Miyares was inspired to illustrate this poem in particular because he believes it “powerfully contrasts a day smothered by inequality with one of bright hope.”

Floyd Cooper illustrates Coming Home which opens with lines of verse from Hughes but tells his life story instead. His notes indicate that he views Hughes as a “beacon for all dreamers.” The artwork leans more toward realism, more shadowed and some strained and dramatic facial expressions. I especially love the illustration of young Langston listening to the stories that his grandmother told, stories of heroes.

Clearly intended for older readers than That Is My Dream!, Floyd Cooper’s Coming Home (1994) presents complex and shifting ideas in language which invites questions from children who are pondering the big questions (surrounding belief and belonging, for instance) before they necessarily have the vocabulary to express themselves. (So, perhaps not ideal for bedtime reading, but ultimately more satisfying for adult readers too.)

And, speaking of older readers, Lesa Cline-Ransome’s Finding Langston (2018) is a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and it won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. (It’s actually part of a trilogy, if you’re looking to lengthen your TBR even more.)

It opens when Langston is eleven years old, when he’s left Alabama for the south side of Chicago (a movement that, on a national scale, would come to be known as the Great Migration). “Just like in Alabama, folks here are in all shades of brown, so many they call this part of Chicago the Black Ghetto, or the Black Belt. But of all the names this place is called, I love the name Bronzeville. A place filled with people, each one some color of bronze.”

My favourite part is when he discovers the public library: “The [library] lady starts walking farther into the library and I keep following and let myself breathe in the library smells. Old paper, glue, and wood. Smells better than Mama’s peach cobbler.”

He returns another day to borrow books, having kept the secret of his initial visit close to his heart. “Librarian, selections. I don’t know what any of those words mean. But I aim to find out.” And it’s at the library that he learns he’s been named for Langston Hughes.

This was a surprise to me: I thought it was actually about Langston Hughes. But that’s okay. I knew that I had Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes on my stack next. Well, volume one anyway, covering 1902-1941. Apparently requesting a two-volume set from the library is complicated; I can’t seem to get them both! (Don’t you feel bad for all the subsequent volumes, the ones that get excited when they hear the rumour of a request but then, once more they’re left behind, the first volumes rewarded with field trip after field trip?)

Hughes had always thought that Arna Bontemps would write his biography, according to George Houston Bass (English professor and executor of the Langston Hughes estate), but Bontemps died in 1973, before he could begin work on the project. Rampersad met Bass at a concert and began work on the biography a few months later, in 1979. (The first volume was published in 1986.)

Rampersad included among his responsibilities, a need to “correct the record without pockmarking my text with reprimands”. He believed some of the misinformation came from Hughes’ own autobiographical writing and he was also concerned with correcting the “increasingly fashionable tendency to assert, without convincing evidence, that Hughes was a homosexual.” This biography feels authoritative and exhaustive, but simultaneously readable, with the scholarship tucked into the reference materials at the back.

I’m glad to have been reading this book at this stage of the project. When I come across a passage where Langston is visiting the Knopf offices in 1932 and admiring the drawing by Helen Sewell to accompany his poems in The Dream Keeper, I know exactly what he’s looking at. And I’ve already read The Big Sea (but not the follow-up, not yet) and encountered the question of his orientation.

But it’s easy to imagine that, for many readers, this volume would be the launch for a project like this. Maybe I should have begun here, but I’ve wholly enjoyed my reading for this year’s Writing Life posts and it’s one of the reasons that I’m planning to read more poetry in 2022. My Hughes reading hasn’t been as structured, and I’ve felt as though I’ve been reading around Langston, as much as I’ve been reading his own work, but maybe that’s all research is: reading around.

Curious about the other posts in this series? Or previous Langston Hughes posts? One, two, three.

What author intrigues you? Have you a literary biography to recommend?