This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963-the most comprehensive available-showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.
"Perhaps more than any other writer in American history, Hughes was able to capture 'the Harlemness of the American predicament' (to quote Ralph Ellison's wonderful phrase), in words that had the ring of truth not just in literary circles but in barbershops and beauty parlors of everyday Harlem itself."
Robert G. O'Meally, New York Newsday
"[Hughes's] fiction...manifests his 'wonder at the world.' As these stories reveal, that wonder has lost little of its shine."
Brooke Horvath, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A good example of how Hughes attempted the balancing act of writing an engaged literary and genuinely popular literature that spoke for and of the everyday lives of African-Americans."
