German, too, before he was 20, and he had had a year at Columbia. He was reading French before he was 17, and he wanted to write about his own people, and make them live, in stories as realistic as Maupassant's. Had been appearing in the Negro magazine Crisis. He had been writing poetry since he left grammar school (the beginning is an amusing little tale) Carl Sandburg became his literary idol when he was in high school in Cleveland, and for four years his poems

When Langston Hughes made himself known to Vachel Lindsay at the Wardman Park Hotel he was poor and unhappy and almost hopeless of completing his college education, but he was by no means unlearned his life had certainly not been tethered to monotony

It is a poet who is the fisher, and the poet's miracle of combining subjectivity with detachment is in the gathering of the nets. But its profound quality and lasting worth are to be found in the fact thatįrom first to last, through all these and other experiences and observations, it remains both sensitive and poised, candid and reticent, realistic and unembittered. It can be remembered more thoughtfully asĪ personal re-creation of Negro life from pre-war days, through war and post-war conditions and fevers, against backgrounds of contrast both in place and time.

Of Harlem's 'Black Renaissance.' The book can be followed through with fascination as a success story and chronicle of adventure, full of living individuals and colorful scenes. 'The Big Sea' is the story of a Negro who began life as the child of a poor family in the Midwest in the first decade of this century, and who after that was a successful business man's son and also a teacher of English in Mexico, a night-clubĬook and waiter in Paris, a mess boy on freighters halfway around the world, a starving beachcomber in Genoa, a laundry hand in Washington, a student at Columbia and Lincoln Universities, and at once a participant in and a clear-eyed observer Langston Hughes'sĪutobiography is the product and portrait of a very unusual spirit, in its narrative of crowded happenings and contrasts and the envisioning of a strange and significant time. Now that it is here before us, the noteworthy quality of the poet's latest book passes well beyond its content of remarkable situation and incident. And neither then nor in these years since, as Langston Hughes has continued to produce sensitive and thoughtful work in prose and verse, has the fullĬourse of his extraordinary career been generally guessed. He had been a great many things, in twenty-three years of a remarkably eventful history. Or had he been, some asked each other, an elevator operator? As a matter of fact, It is fifteen years since Vachel Lindsay brought a new item of literary interest to the public in the discovery of a poet who was a colored bus boy in a Washington hotel. A Negro Intellectual Tells His Life StoryĪugA Negro Intellectual Tells His Life Story By KATHERINE WOODS

Hughes the big sea