At Jacket Copy, Lynell George Unravels Langston Hughes's Letters

Yet another critic is singing the praises of Knopf's newly published edition of Langston Hughes's letters. Last week, we mentioned that NYTimes recently got hip to the collected letters. Now, check out Lynell George's spin at Jacket Copy:

In 1960, the NAACP presented its highest honor — the Spingarn Medal — to poet and activist Langston Hughes. In accepting, Hughes made a point to give credit where he believed it was most due: "I can accept this only in the name of the Negro people who have given me the materials out of which my poems and stories, plays and songs have come."

Hughes wasn't just a voice for "Negro America," but an ear — one finely tuned and sensitive — trained on some of the country's most remote and forgotten corners.

For five decades, he listened: recording the rhythms, reach and richness of the black experience with the dedication of an anthropologist and the nuanced rendering of an artist. His prose and poetry were the formal spaces — a stage — where black people across the social strata could speak frankly about racial injustice, economic inequity and strategies for uplift.

Hughes took seriously his role as multifaceted chronicler, penning poems, short stories, newspaper columns, plays and librettos, but he was also a dedicated letter-writer who spent years asking after manuscripts, answering reader inquiries, advising old acquaintances, cultivating new ones. The assemblage would ultimately become "[s]o vast it could fill 20 large volumes," writes longtime Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad in his introduction to the new collection of Hughes' correspondence, "Selected Letters of Langston Hughes," co-edited with David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro.

Their resulting compilation — constructed as "a life in letters" — comes in at nearly 500 pages, meticulously footnoted and succinctly introduced by two contextualizing essays that fill in Hughes' biography and outline their editorial process. [...]

Learn more at Jacket Copy. See you in the reading room!