The only collaboration between the two brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance--Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

In 1930, two giants of African American literature joined forces to create a lively, insightful, often wildly farcical look inside a rural Southern black community--the three-act play "Mule Bone." In this hilarious story, Jim and Dave are a struggling song-and-dance team, and when a woman comes between them, chaos ensues in their tiny Florida hometown. This extraordinary theatrical work broke new ground while triggering a bitter controversy between the collaborators that kept it out of the public eye for sixty years.

This edition of the rarely seen stage classic features Hurston's original short story, "The Bone of Contention," as well as the complete recounting of the acrimonious literary dispute that prevented Mule Bone from being produced or published until decades after the authors' deaths.

In a poor town in Kansas, an African American family struggles. At its centre sits Sandy Rodgers - a young boy attempting to find purpose amid the chaos, meagreness and music of his surroundings. His narrative intertwines with those of his family - his wandering father, his fervent grandmother, his blues-singing aunt - to create a brilliantly intricate portrait of Black life in the early twentieth century. Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes' unforgettable debut novel, is a landmark in the history of a racially divided America and one of the jewels of the Harlem Renaissance.

This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963--the most comprehensive available--showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.

Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition.

Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof."

As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations."

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, went to Cleveland, Ohio, lived for a number of years in Chicago, and long resided in New York City's Harlem. He graduated form Lincoln University in 1929 and was awarded an honorary Litt. D. in 1943. He was perhaps best known as a poet and the creator of Simple, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays (several of them Broadway hits), and children's books, and he edited several anthologies. Mr. Hughes died in 1967.

A celebration of music from beginning to end, The Weary Blues is the debut poetry collection by the foremost Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes. Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play. / Down on Lenox Avenue the other night / By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light / He did a lazy sway. . . With these first lines, Hughes invites the reader into an experimental playground that tells the story of a Black man's life in America. Featuring poems such as, "Dream Variations," "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and "Our Land," Hughes weaves in and out of verse, highlighting the lows of struggle in the face of segregation and racism, but also the highs of creation from the time when, "the Negroes were in vogue." Now considered to be an American classic, The Weary Blues embodies the feel of the rhythm, improvisation, and soul of Black classical music, pioneered the genre of "jazz poetry," and left an irreplaceable mark in the African-American literary canon. Professionally typeset with a beautifully designed cover, this edition of The Weary Blues is a sensational reimagining of a Harlem Renaissance staple for the modern reader.

Winner of the Coretta Scott King illustrator award, "I, Too, Am America "blends the poetic wisdom of Langston Hughes with visionary illustrations from Bryan Collier in this inspirational picture book that carries the promise of equality.

"I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong."
Langston Hughes was a courageous voice of his time, and his authentic call for equality still rings true today. Beautiful paintings from Barack Obama illustrator Bryan Collier accompany and reinvent the celebrated lines of the poem "I, Too," creating a breathtaking reminder to all Americans that we are united despite our differences.
This picture book of Langston Hughes's celebrated poem, "I, Too, Am America," is also a Common Core Text Exemplar for Poetry.

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

Discover the power and joy of poetry in this simple, modern introduction to Langston Hughes, featuring an ode to spring and long-awaited new beginningsIn this illustrated adaptation of a beloved Langston Hughes poem, a child delights as the world around him awakens from winter and comes to life with the long-awaited arrival of spring and new beginnings of all kinds.

With a new introduction by the multi-prizewinning young poet Kayo Chingonyi. For over forty years, until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes captured in his poetry the lives of black people in the USA. This edition is Hughes's own selection of his work, and was first published in 1959. It includes all of his best known poems including 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers', 'The Weary Blues', 'Song for Billie Holiday', 'Black Maria', 'Magnolia Flowers', 'Lunch in a Jim Crow Car' and 'Montage of a Dream Deferred'. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is now seen as one of the great chroniclers of black American experience - and one of the great artists of the twentieth century.

A collection of interviews, speeches, and essays by Langston Hughes. Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes is a record of a remarkable man talking. In texts ranging from early interviews in the 1920s, when he was a busboy and scribbling out poems on hotel napkins, to major speeches, such as his keynote address at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, Hughes's words further amplify the international reputation he established over the course of five decades through more widely-published and well-known poems, stories, novels, and plays. In these interviews, speeches, and conversational essays, the writer referred to by admirers as the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race" and the "Dean of Black Letters" articulated some of his most powerful critiques of fascism, economic and racial oppression, and compromised democracy. It was also through these genres that Hughes spoke of the responsibilities of the Black artist, documented the essential contributions of Black people to literature, music, and theatre, and chronicled the substantial challenges that Black artists face in gaining recognition, fair pay, and professional advancement. And it was through these pieces, too, that Hughes built on his celebrated work in other literary genres to craft an original, tragic-comic persona-a Blues poet in exile, forever yearning for and coming back to a home, a nation, that nevertheless continues to disappoint and harm him. A global traveler, Hughes's words, "Let America be America Again" were, throughout his career, always followed by a caveat: "America never was America to me."

In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s.

"My little dark baby, / My little earth-thing, / My little love-one, / What shall I sing / For your lullaby?" With a few simple words as smooth as a song, the poet Langston Hughes celebrates the love between an African American mother and her baby. The award-winning illustrator Sean Qualls's painted and collaged artwork captures universally powerful maternal moments with tenderness and whimsy. In the end, readers will find a rare photo of baby Hughes and his mother, a biographical note, further reading, and the complete lullaby. Like little love-ones, this beautiful book is a treasure.

Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribue to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.

THE CELEBRATED SHORT STORY COLLECTION FROM THE AMERICAN POET AND WRITER OFTEN CALLED THE 'POET LAUREATE OF HARLEM' A black maid forms a close bond with the daughter of the cruel white couple for whom she works. Two rich, white artists hire a black model to pose as a slave. A white-passing boy ignores his mother when they cross each other on the street. Written with sardonic wit and a keen eye for the absurdly unjust, these fourteen stories about racial tensions are as relevant today as the day they were penned, and linger in the mind long after the final page is turned. 'Powerful, polemical pieces' New York Times 'Some of the best stories that have appeared in this country in years' North American Review

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.  The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night."  They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture.  They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."

The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America."  It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

These never-before published translations of "Blood Wedding" and "Yerma" unite two of Federico Garcia Lorca's most passionate masterpieces with two of America's most gifted poets, Langston Hughes and W.S. Merwin.

Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations - the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India's Ganges, Egypt's Nile, the Yellow River of China - and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it is natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents. English poets from Shakespeare and Dryden, Wordsworth and Byron to Ted Hughes, John Betjeman and Alice Oswald; Irish poets - Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, to name but a few; Scottish and Welsh poets from Henry Vaughan and Robert Louis Stevenson to Robin Robertson and Gillian Clarke. A whole raft of American poets from Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey and Grace Paley. Folk songs. African-American spirituals. Poems from ancient Egypt and Rome. From medieval China and Japan. And a truly international selection of modern poets from Europe (France, Italy, Russia, Serbia), India, Africa, Australia and South and Central America, all combining in celebration of the rivers of the world. From the Mississippi to the Limpopo. From the Dart to the Danube. Plunge in.

"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar--. [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music--. This book is a glorious revelation."--Boston Globe

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.

Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

Langston Hughes, one of America's greatest writers, was an innovator of jazz poetry and a leader of the Harlem Renaissance whose poems and plays resonate widely today. Accessible, personal, and inspirational, Hughes' poems portray the African American community in struggle in the context of a turbulent modern United States and a rising black freedom movement. This indispensable volume of letters between Hughes and four leftist confidants sheds vivid light on his life and politics. Letters from Langston begins in 1930 and ends shortly before his death in 1967, providing a window into a unique, self-created world where Hughes lived at ease. This distinctive volume collects the stories of Hughes and his friends in an era of uncertainty and reveals their visions of an idealized world-one without hunger, war, racism, and class oppression.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.
"Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature . . . a powerful interpreter of the American experience." --"The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Arguably the most important writer to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, Langston Hughes was a great poet and a shrewd and lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.
Vintage Hughes" "includes the poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American Fragment," "Scottsboro," "The Negro Mother," "Good Morning Revolution," "I Dream a World," "The Heart of Harlem," "Freedom Train," "Song for Billie Holliday," "Nightmare Boogie," "Africa," "Black Panther," "Birmingham Sunday," and "UnAmerican Investigators"; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: "Cora Unashamed," "Home," and "The Blues I'm Playing."