Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 315: Langston Hughes, a Documentary Volume (review)

Dead poets who grow in post-mortem fame inevitably find themselves presented in ever richer ways. Major texts are re-edited with notes and introductions; journal articles examine ever broadening themes; lost, fugitive, or archival works are assembled; and competing biographies proffer political, psychological, literary, and other versions of their works and days. And yet, especially for those writers who have deposited their archive in a single place, the most intimate encounter one can have with dead poets is to sojourn in their papers.

The great African American writer Langston Hughes is one such poet. Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and died in 1967 in his beloved Harlem, during his lifetime Hughes published countless poems and over 20 books. Revered in the American Negro community and beyond, Hughes had major accomplishments in poetry, the novel, memoir, short story, humor, theater, song lyric, children's books, and more. Readers of Research in African Literatures know of Hughes's lifelong championing of Africa and the Caribbean, his deep influence on the pioneers of negritude, and his crucial personal support for early modern African writers. Indeed, two of the first three English-language African prose and poetry anthologies—An African Treasury (1960) and Poems from Black Africa (1963)—were edited by Hughes.

Yet, though modern scholars have increasingly been provisioned with editions, essays on, and biographies of Hughes, only those fortunate enough to have visited Yale's Beinecke Library, which holds the bulk of Hughes's papers, have experienced the intimate encounter of the archive. Now, however, Christopher De Santis's superb Hughes-focused documentary contribution to the long-running Dictionary of Literary Biography series makes great strides towards bringing the archival experience to the modern reader. Its hundreds of closely printed, large-format pages provide an embarrassment of riches: reprints of dozens of well-known or obscure-but-deserving poems; excerpts from scores of Hughes's major texts; facsimile reproductions of his prose and poetry in draft, replete with holographic cross-outs and emendations; facsimile reprints of letters between Hughes and Blanche Knopf, Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, and James Baldwin; photographs of Hughes with young Chinua Achebe, Hughes and Arthur Koestler picking cotton in Soviet Turkmenistan in 1933, Hughes and Ernest Hemingway and Nicolás Guillén in Madrid in 1937, and Hughes in West African garb at his college classmate Nnamdi Azikiwe's inauguration as governor general of newly independent Nigeria; a transcript of Hughes's interrogation before Joseph McCarthy's U.S. Senate committee; a far happier interview between Hughes and the South African Richard Rive; and much more.

Linking this cornucopia together is a comprehensive and well-crafted interspersed narrative by De Santis, a lengthy bibliography, and detailed chronology. The overall effect is powerful and rich. Hughes specialists will revel in all manner of this volume's sections, while the broader Research in African Literatures reader will focus not only on the many African and Caribbean connections in the book, but also on the astounding range of the man who was, to the best of my professional knowledge, the first African or Afro-diasporic person to make his living exclusively from his writing. Certainly every college and university library should own this text. Indeed one's only lament is that at $215 (or closer to $170 discounted online), the volume is beyond the reach of many ordinary buyers. Given a more exciting cover and a better price, this visually dizzying book might even fare well in the coffee-table book market. Until that day, as Gaurav Desai said of a different recent volume, I am closely guarding my review copy of this brilliant text.