Hughes's last collection of poems commemorates the experience of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear—the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time. “Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America's acknowledged poet of color. Here, Hughes's voice—sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful—is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as "Prime," "Motto," "Dream Deferred," "Frederick Douglas: 1817-1895," "Still Here," "Birmingham Sunday." " History," "Slave," "Warning," and "Daybreak in Alabama."

James Langston Hughes (1902 -- 1967) With a career that spanned the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and Black Arts movement of the sixties, Langston Hughes was the most prolific Black poet of his era. Between 1926, when he published his pioneering The Weary Blues, to 1967, the year of his death, when he published The Panther and the Lash, Hughes would write sixteen books of poems, two novels, seven collections of short stories, two autobiographies, five works of nonfiction, and nine children's books; he would edit nine anthologies of poetry, folklore, short fiction, and humor. He also translated Jaques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, Federico Garcia Lorca, and write at least thirty plays. It is not surprising that Hughes was known, variously, as "Shakespeare in Harlem" and as the "poet laureate of the American Negro." -- from the Preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes's poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s.