Langston Hughes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Then, at three or four or five o’clock, or even later, he sat at his typewriter and pounded out letters (more than thirty on many nights) that went all over the world. Later in life, living near one of the noisier sections of Harlem, he wrote through the night, when the brownstone row house he shared was likely to be quiet. I cannot take my rest until I unpile some of it.” “I leave you now,” he ended a letter in 1944, “to consider the stack of mail on top of mail piled on the bed. “Two drawers are full,” he noted, “so I’m moving my sox over.” All the same, he wanted to be a faithful correspondent.

In fact, at one point he called himself “the world’s worst letter writer.” Another time, he confessed to stuffing away a swelling pile of answered pieces. His friend Carl Van Vechten, for example, received a flood of mail but usually answered each piece on the day it reached him. He admired people who answered letters promptly. With a crowded life that put him in touch over the decades with thousands of people, the mail was crucial to starting and keeping friendships and to doing business. “Who knows better than I,” Langston Hughes once wrote to a friend, “what letter writing entails?” Certainly he knew much about letters. Here’s the first paragraph of Rampersad’s introduction: As he put it, it’s not the writing, but the “getting down to writing” that’s the problem. Hughes and I both have a co mplicated relationship to the world of letters. The new Knopf volume is the first comprehensive selection of his correspondence, edited by Rampersad, winner of the National Humanities Medal (we’ve written about him here and here and here) and David Roessel, with Christa Fratantoro. I haven’t read much of the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, but I adore the man already, after reading Arnold Rampersad‘s engaging, straightforward introduction to him in the new Selected Letters of Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.