The Short Stories of Langston Hughes

by Langston Hughes, Akiba Sullivan Harper (Editor), Arnold Rampersad (Introduction)

Overview

The Short Stories of Langston Hughes, written between 1919 and 1963, showcases the author's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns.

Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809016037
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/15/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	321
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Langston Hughes (1902-67) was born in Joplin, Missouri, was educated at Lincoln University, and lived for most of his life in New York City. He is best known as a poet, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays, and children's books. Among his works are two volumes of memoirs, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, and two collections of Simple stories, The Best of Simple and The Return of Simple.

Akiba Sullivan Harper is a professor of English at Spelman College and the editor of The Return of Simple.

Arnold Rampersad, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Life of Langston Hughes and editor of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Bodies in the Moonlight

The Young Glory of Him

The Little Virgin

Luani of the Jungles

Slave on the Block

Cora Unashamed

The Blues I'm Playing

Why, You Reckon?

Little Old Spy

Spanish Blood

On the Road

Gumption

Professor

Big Meeting

Trouble with the Angels

Tragedy at the Baths

Slice Him Down

African Morning

'Tain't So

One Friday Morning

Heaven to Hell

Breakfast in Virginia

Saratoga Rain

Who's Passing for Who?

On the Way Home

Name in the Papers

Sailor Ashore

Something in Common

Mysterious Madame Shanghai

Never Room with a Couple

Powder-white Faces

Pushcart Man

Rouge High

Patron of the Arts

Thank You, M'am

Sorrow for a Midget

Blessed Assurance

Early Autumn

Fine Accommodations

The Gun

His Last Affair

No Place to Make Love

Rock, Church

Appendix: Early Stories

Mary Winosky

Those Who Have No Turkey

Seventy-Five Dollars

The Childhood of Jimmy

Publication History of Hughes's Short Stories

Editorial Reviews

Perhaps more than any other writer in American history, Hughes was able to capture 'the Harlemness of the American predicament' (to quote Ralph Ellison's wonderful phrase), in words that had the ring of truth not just in literary circles but in barbershops and beauty parlors of everyday Harlem itself.” —Robert G. O'Meally, New York Newsday

“[Hughes's] fiction...manifests his 'wonder at the world.' As these stories reveal, that wonder has lost little of its shine.” —Brooke Horvath, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A good example of how Hughes attempted the balancing act of writing an engaged literary and genuinely popular literature that spoke for and of the everyday lives of African-Americans.” —James Smethurst, Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

In interviews and in his writing, Langston Hughes liked to describe himself as a poet first. But according to Arnold Rampersand, in his introduction to the newly collected Short Stories of Langston Hughes, Hughes was also fond of calling himself "a literary sharecropper." Beginning in 1926 -- that long-ago time when writers could live off their fiction -- short stories were his cash crop.

But while Hughes often considered fiction writing a way of keeping himself alive, his stories -- unlike those of many professional writers at the time -- are never less than sharp and poetic. The mostly out-of-print stories in this volume, collected by editor Akiba Sullivan Harper, are an extraordinary testament to his talent as a prose writer. Published between 1919 and 1963, the stories move chronologically from a series based on Hughes' experience as a young seaman along the coast of West Africa to later stories set in a variety of major cities. Also included are three stories that Hughes wrote in high school which have until now been stored in archives.

Whether in Dakar or Reno or Manhattan, Hughes puts his predominantly black characters in settings rife with prejudice -- the black professor in white academia, the young black piano player with a white patron, a black acting troupe performing at white-only theaters. His tone is often somewhat instructional: "One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kind-hearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help," he writes in Who's Passing for Who? As with his poetry, race and identity are Hughes' subjects -- whites passing for black and blacks passing for white, a prostitute claiming that she has a son and lives in Beverly Hills when she has nothing, a preacher who says he is Jesus.

This collection reflects Hughes' enormous gift as not only a fiction writer but an historian as well, a connection that is hardly accidental. As the narrator explains at the end of the first seafaring story, "Those things are almost forgotten now -- but the scar, and the memory. . . make me write this story."--Salon

Maud Casey

Eight of the forty-seven stories in this welcome volume of Hughes's short fiction have never before been collected, and the rest are from long out-of-print books. The chronological arrangement (the pieces were written between 1919 and 1963) gives us a full appreciation of Hughes's evolution as a man of letters.

Three high-school tales not previously collected demonstrate Hughes's youthful social conscience and his early, solid command of his craft. His early protagonists struggle against poverty, leading lives of quiet sorrow. A series of sea stories reflects his own experience as a sailor, all involving trips to the West Coast of Africa, where, variously, sailors fight over a beautiful native girl, a naïve missionary girl commits suicide after a sailor compromises her virtue, and a romantic European is entranced by his African wife. A number of pieces from the '30s concern the black artist's ambivalent relation to his white patrons: In "The Blues I'm Playing," a brilliant pianist defies her condescending sponsor to marry a young doctor; and the bohemians in "Slave on the Rock" degrade their black servants while romanticizing the black race. Throughout the Depression, Hughes documented the struggle of blacks simply to survive. In one story, a homeless man hallucinates about breaking into a church and finding Christ himself inside. Hughes's Communist sympathies also surface in a few pieces, as in a tale of racism and red-baiting at the WPA, or the superb record of a failed strike by black actors in "Trouble with the Angels." But many of the stories simply chronicle the vibrancy of Harlem life, the passions of ordinary black people, and the indignities of everyday racism. "On Friday Morning" is the heartbreaking tale of an aspiring artist denied her art school scholarship because of her race.

Stories that, at their best, provide a remarkable portrait of black America over several crucial decades: an important collection that can only enhance our admiration of a great American writer.

Kirkus Reviews