Langston Hughes in Context

Vera M. Kutzinski · Anthony Reed

Nov 2022 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

About the author

Vera M. Kutzinski is Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. Kutzinski has published widely on Langston Hughes and black diasporic literatures from the United States, the Caribbean, and South America.

Anthony Reed, Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014), winner of the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and Soundworks: Race, Poetry, and Sound in Production (2021).