New York Times Reviews Selected Letters of Langston Hughes

Yesterday, just in time for Langston Hughes's birthday on February 1st, NYT observed a newly-published selection of Langston Hughes's letters. The very handsome volume, published by Knopf, was edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro. From NYT:

The poet Langston Hughes was a courtly man with a slow fuse. “Violent anger,” he wrote in his memoir “The Big Sea” (1940), “makes me physically ill.”

Yet he spoke his mind. When he was invited to a White House lunch hosted by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the talk turned to whether William Faulkner, already a Nobel Prize winner, deserved the 1962 gold medal for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hughes would have none of it. In a letter to a friend, the poet and librarian Arna Bontemps, printed in a new book, “Selected Letters of Langston Hughes,” he wrote: “I was forced to rise and state in plain English why I wouldn’t give it to the leading Southern cracker novelist if it were left to me, great ‘writer’ though he may be.”

(Faulkner, who opposed segregation, had nonetheless been quoted in The Sunday Times of London in 1956 as saying he would “fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Faulkner later called this comment “foolish” and “more a misconstruction than a misquotation.”)

Hughes’s forceful letter only got better when he wrote, in the next sentence: “I was sitting next to Carson McCullers and we had fun translating the French menu into jive English for her cullud cook to try some of the dishes.”

Hughes (1902-1967) disliked writing letters. He was the busiest of busy writers — always broke and hustling, he called himself “a literary sharecropper” — and correspondence got in the way of his real work: poems, novels, short stories, memoirs, children’s books, plays, translations, opera librettos, anthologies, newspaper columns. He was so prolific that, in a 1956 letter, he complained about “a book due yesterday that I haven’t even started.” [...]

Learn more courtesy of The New York Times.