Poetry and Prose

Hughes, Langston and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. The first and only complete collection of Hughes’s poems, with introduction, chronology, and notes, edited by Hughes’s esteemed biographer, Arnold Rampersad.

Hughes, Langston and Akiba Harper, ed. Short Stories of Langston Hughes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

Biography, Autobiography, and Letters

Bernard, Emily, ed. Remember Me to Harlem : The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. A collection of letters between Hughes and his mentor Carl Van Vechten.

Berry, Faith. Before and Beyond Harlem: Biography of Langston Hughes. New York: Random House, 1995. A critical biography that analyzes many of Hughes’s less frequently anthologized poems against the historical backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and the biographical details of his life.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. A lyrical autobiography.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 2, 1941-1967: I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The definitive critical biography of Hughes in two volumes. The first volume focuses on Hughes’s childhood through the height of his career, and volume two follows Hughes through the decline of his career and eventually through the civil rights movement of the sixties. The biography is notable for its intense psychological examinations of Hughes’s character and personality and is based on extensive research of the Hughes Papers at Yale’s Bienecke Library.

Criticism

Gates, Henry Louis, ed. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past And Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Edited by notable scholar Henry Louis Gates, this volume contains essays by Countee Cullen, James Baldwin, Arnold Rampersad and others.

Rampersad, Arnold. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. Lincoln: Garland Publishing, 1995. A collection of essays from the 1995 Lincoln University conference on Hughes.

Audio

Langston Hughes (Voice of the Poet) New York: Random House Audio, 2002. Audio recordings of Langston Hughes reading his own work with commentary by J. D. McClatchy.