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Genuine Gifts
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11726 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1987 |
2,435 Words |
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James J. Thompson Jr.
James J. Thompson Jr.'s latest book is Fleeing the Whore of
Babylon: A Modern Conversion Story. |
THE LIFE OF LANGSTON HUGHES
Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America
Arnold Rampersad
Oxford University Press, 1986
468 pp., $22.95 cloth
Eight years before his death in 1967, Langston Hughes culled his life's labor to extract the poems for which he wished to be remembered. James Baldwin, the rising star of black letters, reviewed The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes for the New York Times. His verdict was harsh: "Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts - and depressed that he has done so little with them....This book contains a great deal which a more disciplined poet would have thrown into the wastebasket."
Hailed before World War II as America's greatest black writer, Hughes had watched his fame erode over the years. The beginning of that slide from prominence can be pegged most precisely to 1940, when Hughes published his autobiography The Big Sea in the same year that Richard Wright astonished the literary world with Native Son. With one book, Wright snatched the mantle Hughes considered rightfully his own.
A dozen years later, Hughes had to defer to another competitor, this time to Ralph Ellison, who in 1952 published The Invisible Man, a novel most critics still consider the greatest book by a black American.
Hughes enjoyed a certain vogue in the late 1960s and 1970s as a writer who had pioneered the idea
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