Hughes, Langston | Alice Walker (essay date fall 1989)
Alice Walker (essay date fall 1989)
SOURCE: Walker, Alice. “Turning into Love: Some Thoughts on Surviving and Meeting Langston Hughes.” Callaloo 12, no. 4 (fall 1989): 663-66.
[In the following essay, the transcript of a lecture given by poet Alice Walker during the Langston Hughes Festival in 1989, Walker describes her relationship with Hughes.]
If it had not been for the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence in 1965, I would never have met Langston Hughes. It was she who gave him my short story, To Hell With Dying; she who understood the trauma and insight that was at the root of it; she who—in her rather hearty, absent-minded friendliness—was determined to support me as a young writer. She also introduced me to her own agent, Monica McCall, and told me to send my first batch of poems from my book, Once, to The New Yorker, a magazine I'd never read.
Years afterwards she and I...
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