Selected Letters of Langston Hughes

A publishing event: for the first time ever, a glorious comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the canonical African American author-a virtual "life in letters," showcasing his struggles and extraordinary achievement.

This unprecedented collection of Langston Hughes's letters is arranged by decades, with helpful interstitial material and notes throughout to guide us through Hughes's journey in all its aspects: literary, personal, political, practical. His correspondents include such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright. The letters tell the story of a writer finding his voice; struggling with how to support himself in a literary career; reaching out to students in segregated schools in the South; using his artistic clout in the service of the disenfranchised or wrongly accused; and discovering, above all, that as an African American writer in a segregated America, his only true freedom was to be found on the page. Photographs and quotes from the poetry enliven the volume and give a fuller picture of this generous, visionary, and gratifyingly good man who was a genius of modern American letters.

David Roessel is the associate editor, with Arnold Rampersad, of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, as well as the coeditor, with Nicholas Moschovakis, of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams and Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays by Tennessee Williams. He is the author of In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, which won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, and is the Peter and Stella Yiannos Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Arnold Rampersad, the Sarah Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, was a longtime Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University, where he was also director of American Studies and director of the Program in African American Studies. His books include the two-volumeLife of Langston Hughes, as well as biographies of Jackie Robinson and Ralph Ellison. His numerous awards and honors include the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House in 2011.