Dec 29, 2009
In the opening of Langston Hughes’s first autobiography, The Big Sea, the author recalls how he heaved his books overboard at the start of his first journey to Africa in 1923. The gesture may be seen as adolescent and anti-intellectual, but it suggests the commencement of Hughes’s role as a Renaissance man in Black American letters. The book chronicles the first twenty-seven years of Hughes’s life, from the 1920’s, when he explored the idiom and jazz rhythms of African Americans in his poetry, to the shift to his bitter prose of the 1930’s.
The...
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