Not Without Laughter: A Novel: A Library of America eBook Classic

Langston Hughes

may 2018 · Library of America

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Rediscover the great Harlem Renaissance poet’s first and only novel—an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale about an African American family set in the Midwest at the dawn of World War I

Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter is drawn in part from the author’s own recollections of youth and early manhood. “I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West,” he later explained of his award-winning debut, and it is as a fond and richly anecdotal family and community portrait that his book comes to life.
 
Following Sandy Rogers from his boyhood in rural Kansas to his arrival in Chicago as a young man, and set against a backdrop of poverty, segregation, and the onset of World War I, it introduces us to a host of vividly realized characters along the way: Sandy’s pious, redoubtable grandmother Hager, who holds the generations together; his itinerant father Jimboy with his guitar; mother Annjee, who keeps house for wealthy whites; blues-singing Aunt Harriet; proper, social-climbing Aunt Tempy; and many more.

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James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902–1967), was one of the major writers of the last century and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised by his grandmother, he spent much of his youth in Kansas and Ohio before eventually settling in Harlem. On the strength of his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), he was awarded a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1929. He would go one to publish more than thirty-five books across a range of genres, including such landmark works as the book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).