"Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond," University of California Press, February 2016

Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare & Beyond

Langston Hughes (Author), Evelyn Louise Crawford (Editor), MaryLouise Patterson (Editor), Robin D.G. Kelley (Foreword)

MaryLouise Patterson writes in the Guest Book at AfriClassical.com:

Hello: I have co-edited a book of correspondence  between my and my co-editor's parents and  Langston Hughes, entitled "Letters from Langston:  From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare  and Beyond" and would like for you to review it  and post it. It was published by Univ. CA Press in  Feb. 2016. Yours, MaryLouise Patterson University of California Press Langston Hughes, one of America's greatest  writers, was an innovator of jazz poetry and  a leader of the Harlem Renaissance whose  poems and plays resonate widely today.  Accessible, personal, and inspirational,  Hughes’s poems portray the African American  community in struggle in the context of a  turbulent modern United States and a rising  black freedom movement. This indispensable  volume of letters between Hughes and four  leftist confidants sheds vivid light on his life  and politics. Letters from Langston begins in 1930 and ends  shortly before his death in 1967, providing a  window into a unique, self-created world where  Hughes lived at ease. This distinctive volume  collects the stories of Hughes and his friends in  an era of uncertainty and reveals their visions  of an idealized world—one without hunger, war,  racism, and class oppression.