| The Collected Works of Langston Hughes |
According to Phillip M. Richards, Langston Hughes "establish(ed) himself as the first fully professional African American writer"1 in the early 20th century. Hughes declined his father's offer to educate him as an engineer and resisted later pressure to become a teacher. He was determined to make his living as a poet and writer. In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote short stories, novels, essays, plays, works for children, and articles for magazines and newspapers. He made frequent public appearances to read his work, so he was well known to the contemporary American public.
One hundred years after his birth, the University of Missouri Press began publishing The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. This huge project (there are now 16 volumes) has been overseen by Hughes scholar Arnold Rampersad, who also edited some of the individual volumes. The volumes are topical, for example, volume nine is "Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs" and volume ten is "Fight for Freedom and Related Writings on Civil Rights." Most of the volumes in the set are devoted to collecting Hughes' literary work, but there are volumes that focus on his autobiography and his work as a translator as well. While Hughes is well known for his own writing, many people do not know that he did translations, too. Volume 16 of this set is "The Translations: Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain". Each volume of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes has an introduction, a chronology, biographical details, letters, documents, and other background information to establish the context for Hughes' work. There are also annotations included with the works. In addition to providing access to the work of Langston Hughes, this extensive collection provides a fascinating look at Hughes' life and the United States from the 1920's through the 1960's (Hughes died in 1967). The Collected Works of Langston Hughes is available online through ebrary, an electronic book collection. There are many advantages to using a collection like this in an electronic format. The ebrary reader has a "search the text" feature that will identify occurrences of a term within the book. Many of the volumes have an index of titles at the end but not a topical index. The search feature allowed me to see where keywords occurred in the text even when those words were not in the index. This format also allows multiple volumes to be open at once (for example, I kept the chronology from one volume open in one window while reading poems from another volume so that I could refer back and forth.) The other useful feature of this format is the ability to jump quickly to a particular page from the table of contents screen. Please note: you don't need a password to search ebrary from anywhere on campus. If you are a current student or employee of Niagara University, you can search ebrary from off campus, but you will need a user id and password. Please visit the Request Passwords For Off-Campus Access to Library Databases page for easy instructions. The Library also owns The Life of Langston Hughes (PS3515.U274 Z698 1986) by Arnold Rampersad and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (PS3515.U274 A17 1994) edited by Rampersad and David Roessel. These two titles are shelved on the second floor of the Library.
1 Richards, Phillip M, "Black romantic," The American Scholar 72, no. 3, (2003): 152.
Kristine Kasbohm wrote this Monthly Book Spotlight.
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