Selected Poems Langston Hughes
Serpent’s Tail Classics
with a foreword by Lemn Sissay
The essential poems of the man named by the New Yorker as ‘the poet laureate of black America’ For over forty years, until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes captured in his poetry the lives of black people in the USA. This edition is Hughes’s own selection of his work, and was first published in 1959. It includes all of his best known poems including ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, ‘The Weary Blues’, ‘Song for Billie Holiday’, ‘Black Maria’, ‘Magnolia Flowers’, ‘Lunch in a Jim Crow Car’ and ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is now seen as one of the great chroniclers of black American experience – and one of the great artists of the twentieth century.
Poetry £9.99 B-format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78816 451 1 320pp October 2020 UK Com ex Can
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Langston Hughes was born in 1902. His poem ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ appeared in Crisis in 1921. In 1925, Hughes was awarded the first Prize for Poetry by Opportunity magazine for his poem ‘The Weary Blues’. He wrote poetry, short stories, song lyrics, essays, humour and plays and an autobiography, The Big Sea.
‘Langston Hughes, for me, was always the poet of the people.’ Claudia Rankine ‘Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed … Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music.’ James Baldwin
