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4.0 

The Big Sea

By Langston Hughes & Arnold Rampersad
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes & Arnold Rampersad digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

With an introduction by Hughes’ award-winning biographer, this memoir is “excellent reading . . . remarkable as a self portrait and a record” (New York Times).

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade—Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet—at the center of the Harlem Renaissance.

Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: “This is American writing at its best—simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer . . . Mark Twain.”

“Langston Hughes is the Jazz Poet! The constant communicator of Blues. He is the singer, philosopher, the folk and urban lyricist. This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” —Amiri Baraka, award-winning poet, dramatist and author

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41 Reviews

4.0
“4.5 stars I have so many thoughts about this book that it's hard to smooth them out into one simple, cohesive review. The Big Sea follows Langston Hughes's life from childhood up until his winning of the Hammond Award at age thirty-two, and during that time he does so much. He has a childhood living with his Indigenous-Black grandma and floating around the slums of big cities with his mom, he lives in Mexico with his father for spells as a teenager, he drops out of Columbia, travels Africa and Europe as a sailor, gets involved in the French jazz scene, rummages for scraps on the streets of Italian coastal cities, makes it back to America only to be welcomed as a well-respected poet in the East Coast's Black society, navigates the Harlem Renaissance, and does all this while passing entertaining stories and fascinating observations about the times he navigated. Hughes passes through so many scenes and histories that it could take about five different reviews to fully capture all of them. He critiqued the classism and desire to cater to whiteness of Washington's middle- and upper- class, he critiqued the disdain for all the parts of Blackness considered "ugly" (the poverty, the colorism, etc.), he gave fascinating first-hand accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and some of the most celebrated members of the Renaissance and the Paris jazz scene, and so many other things that I can't even fit into this review. Even so, Hughes's autobiography was remarkably externally focused. Everything he wrote about was something that happened to him, or something that he did, and hardly ever scraped the surface of his inner world. I don't want to say that it's because of the writing style, because I think you can certainly create emotional scenes with simple prose, but the writing certainly didn't help. The same simplicity that helped relay wonderfully charming life stories sort of fell apart when he was describing anything emotional. You could see what he was describing, sure, and you could understand the reasoning behind it, but you couldn't really feel it. The closest we really get to feeling his emotional state is when it becomes physical: when he made himself so angry that he laid in bed for a week, when he was dismissed by his benefactor and found himself woefully ill, then you could feel that he was sick. But you could never really feel his emotions. That was a little bit of a disappointment. But overall, I loved The Big Sea. Four-and-a-half stars, because it was kind of lacking in some parts, but it was also one of the better autobiographies I've had the pleasure of reading, and the insight into one of the most influential Black artists of the 20th century and the cultural state of the time is something with immeasurable value.”

About Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, went to Cleveland, Ohio, lived for a number of years in Chicago, and long resided in New York City's Harlem. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1929 and was awarded an honorary Litt. D. in 1943. He was perhaps best known as a poet and the creator of Simple, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays (several of them Broadway hits), and children's books, and he edited several anthologies. Mr. Hughes died in 1967.

Arnold Rampersad, author of the widely acclaimed biography The Life of Langston Hughes, is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and director of American Studies at Princeton University.

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