The Life of Langston Hughes (Magill Book Reviews)

In this volume, Rampersad traces Hughes’s life from his humiliations in the early 1940’s, when his career was being jeopardized, to his death in 1967, by which time he was revered as an outstanding Afro-American writer and world-renowned artist whose poems, stories, and plays influenced writers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Rampersad shows Hughes not only grappling with his vision of art and radicalism during World War II, but also contributing to the national war effort while tirelessly attacking segregation in the United States. Here, too, is a detailed recounting of Hughes’s surveillance by the FBI and the hounding he suffered by right-wing forces led by Senator Joe McCarthy, the man who eventually succeeded in forcing the poet to testify about his radical years.

Despite all that Hughes suffered, Rampersad makes clear that the writer never ceased striving to be an artist with words--words which, in his poetry and fiction, expressed his commitment to black life and his passion for jazz and the blues. Especially insightful here is Rampersad’s discussion of how Hughes’s love of literature and life brought him into both fellowship and conflict with such other black writers as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka.

Rampersad, who currently teaches at Columbia University, complements his graceful writing with a meticulous attentiveness to detail; and this volume, together with the first, offers readers a broadly informed view and interpretation of life and culture in the United States and abroad during the first seventy years of this century. Like the first volume, this final one is comprehensive, insightful, and at moments lyrical. It is, in fact, biography of the highest order; its subject deserves nothing less.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, August, 1988, p. 1883.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, July 1, 1988, p. 961.

Library Journal. CXIII, September 15, 1988, p. 85.

Los Angeles Times. September 4, 1988, p. 3.

The Nation. CCXLVII, October 10, 1988, p. 316.

The New Republic. CXCIX, October 10, 1988, p. 34.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, October 9, 1988, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIV, August 26, 1988, p. 70.

The Washington Post Book World. XVIII, November 13, 1988, p. 1.