Letters from Langston ─ From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond

One of the greatest American writers, Langston Hughes 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 invaluable collection of newly published letters between Hughes and two confidantes sheds 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 of correspondence patches together stories of friends and family living in an era of uncertainty and their visions of an idealized worldone without hunger, war, racism, and class oppression.

Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson (a San Francisco art consultant and a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Cornell) are the daughters of some of Langston Hughes's closest black friends and political comrades. They remained cherished friends and confidantes of his for over forty years. Their parents, Louise Thompson Patterson (19011999), William L. Patterson (18911980), Matt N. Crawford (19031996), and Evelyn Graces Crawford (18991972), were black Communist civil rights activists. Langston Hughes often stayed with them, and they all traveled together, corresponded about key issues of the day, and took a joint trip to the Soviet Union. Langston Hughes wrote poems to celebrate both girls' births.