The Poems: 1921-1940( Volume 1 )( Series - Collected Works Of Langston Hughes )

Nearly a century after his birth in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes is, in a sense, coming home. The University of Missouri Press is proud to announce the publication of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, a compilation of the novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays by one of the twentieth century's most prolific and influential African American authors. The sixteen-volume series will make available Hughes's most famous works as well as less well known and out-of-print selections, providing readers and libraries with a comprehensive source for the first time.

Hughes moved to Harlem in the 1920s and ultimately became the most prominent figure in the literary, artistic, and intellectual phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote articles for The Crisis and in 1926 published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. Over the decades until his death in 1967, he became one of the best-known and most versatile American writers of the twentieth century. His creative range -- poetry, novels, short fiction, drama, translations, gospel-song plays, libretti, juvenile fiction, radio and television scripts, history, biography, and autobiography -- is unique in American letters.

The sixteen volumes of the Collected Works are to be published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar. The volume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.

Volume 1 includes the complete texts of Hughes s first book, The Weary Blues (1926), and hissecond, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as other poems published by him during and after the Harlem Renaissance. The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Wait Whitman ("I, too, sing America", Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then, in the 1930s especially, came the radical poetry included in Dear Lovely Death (1934) and A New Song (1938). For example, "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.