Books
Countee Cullen: Copper Sun (Harper)
Countee Cullen, editor: Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (Harper)
Langston Hughes: Fine Clothes to the Jew (Knopf)
Charles S. Johnson, editor: Ebony and Topaz (Journal of Negro Life/National Urban League)
James Weldon Johnson: God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (Knopf)
Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory, editors: Plays of Negro Life (Harper)
1928
January: The first Harmon Foundation art exhibition opens at New York’s International House. April 9: Countee Cullen marries Nina Yolande, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois; the wedding is a major social event, attended by thousands of people. (The marriage breaks up several months later.) May: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson appears on Broadway in the revue Blackbirds of 1928. June: The Messenger ceases publication when the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters can no longer financially support the journal. November: Wallace Thurman publishes the first and only issue of the magazine Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life.
Books
W.E.B. Du Bois: Dark Princess: A Romance (Harcourt, Brace)
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Plum Bun (Frederick Stokes)
Rudolph Fisher: The Walls of Jericho (Knopf)
Georgia Douglas Johnson: An Autumn Love Cycle (Harold Vinal)
Nella Larsen: Quicksand (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Home to Harlem (Harper)
1929
February: Harlem, co-authored by Wallace Thurman and William Rapp, opens on Broadway to mixed reviews. Archibald Motley, Jr. wins gold medal for painting from the Harmon Foundation. October 29: The New York stock market plunges, eliminating much of the funding powering “New Negro” literature and arts.
Books
Countee Cullen: The Black Christ and Other Poems (Harper)
Nella Larsen: Passing (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (Harper)
Wallace Thurman: The Blacker the Berry (Macaulay)
Walter White: Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Knopf)
1930
February: The Green Pastures, a play by Marc Connelly, based on Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), opens on Broadway with an all-black cast; it will be one of the most successful plays of its era. July: The Nation of Islam, colloquially known as the Black Muslims, founded by W. D. Fard in Detroit at the Islam Temple. Dancer and anthropology student Katharine Dunham founds Ballet Nègre in Chicago. James Weldon Johnson publishes a limited edition of “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” a poem protesting the insulting treatment accorded to African American Gold Star Mothers visiting American cemeteries in Europe.
Books
Langston Hughes: Not Without Laughter (Macmillan)
Charles S. Johnson: The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations (Henry Holt)
James Weldon Johnson: Black Manhattan (Knopf)
James Weldon Johnson: Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (Viking Press)
1931
April–July: The “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young African American men accused of raping two white women, are tried and convicted; a massive, lengthy, and only partly successful campaign to free them begins. Sculptor Augusta Savage, whose real-life rebuff by the white art establishment becomes part of the back story for Plum Bun, establishes the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem.
Books
Arna Bontemps: God Sends Sunday (Harcourt, Brace)
Sterling Brown: Outline for the Study of Poetry of American Negroes (Harcourt, Brace)
Countee Cullen: One Way to Heaven (Harper)
Jessie Redmon Fauset: The Chinaberry Tree (Frederick Stokes)
Langston Hughes: Dear Lovely Death (Troutbeck Press)
George S. Schuyler: Black No More (Macaulay)
Jean Toomer: Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Lakeside Press)
1932
June: Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, Louise Thompson, and more than a dozen other African Americans travel to the Soviet Union to film Black and White, a movie about American racism. (Due to shifting Soviet policies, the movie will never be made.)
Books
Sterling Brown: Southern Road (Harcourt, Brace)
Rudolph Fisher: The Conjure-Man Dies (Covici-Friede)
Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Gingertown (Harper; story collection)
George S. Schuyler: Slaves Today (Brewer, Warren, and Putnam)
Wallace Thurman: Infants of the Spring (Macaulay)
Wallace Thurman and Abraham Furman: Interne (Macaulay)
1933
Books
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Comedy: American Style (Frederick A. Stokes)
James Weldon Johnson: Along This Way (Knopf)
Alain Locke: The Negro in America (American Library Association)
Claude McKay: Banana Bottom (Harper)
1934
January: The Apollo Theater opens. February: Negro, an anthology of work by and about African Americans, edited by Nancy Cunard, is published by Wishart in London. March: Dorothy West founds the magazine Challenge. May: W.E.B. Du Bois resigns from the NAACP; he is replaced as editor of The Crisis by Roy Wilkins. November: Aaron Douglas completes Aspects of Negro Life, four murals commissioned by the New York Public Library. December: Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher die within days of one another. Richard Wright writes the initial draft of his first novel, Lawd Today, published posthumously in 1963. M. B. Tolson completes sequence of poems A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, published posthumously in 1979.
Books
Langston Hughes: The Ways of White Folks (Knopf; story collection)
Zora Neale Hurston: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Lippincott)
James Weldon Johnson: Negro Americans, What Now? (Viking Press)
1935
March 19: A riot sparked by rumors of white violence against a Puerto Rican youth results in three African American deaths and millions of dollars in damage to white-owned properties. April: In “Harlem Runs Wild,” published in The Nation, Claude McKay asserts that the riot is “the gesture of despair of a bewildered, baffled, and disillusioned people.” The Works Progress Administration (WPA) established by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; writers and artists who will eventually find employment under its aegis include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, Margaret Walker, Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. October: Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto and George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess open on Broadway.
Books
Countee Cullen: The Medea and Some Poems (Harper)
Frank Marshall Davis: Black Man’s Verse (Black Cat Press)
W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Harcourt, Brace)
Zora Neale Hurston: Mules and Men (Lippincott)
James Weldon Johnson: Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (Viking Press)
1936
February: The National Negro Congress, representing some 600 organizations, holds its first meeting in Chicago. June: Mary McLeod Bethune is appointed Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, becoming the highest-ranking African American official of the Roosevelt administration.
Books
Arna Bontemps: Black Thunder (Macmillan)
Alain Locke: Negro Art—Past and Present (Associates in Negro Folk Education)
Alain Locke: The Negro and His Music (Associates in Negro Folk Education)
Biographical Note
Langston Hughes Born James Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, son of James Nathaniel Hughes, a stenographer for a mining company, and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, an aspiring writer and actress. (In later years, Hughes used the form James Langston Mercer Hughes as his full name.) Hughes’s father left the family shortly after his son’s birth, relocating to Mexico. In the
absence of his father, and with his mother also frequently away, Hughes was raised mostly by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. (Mary Langston’s first husband, Lewis Leary, was an associate of John Brown who was killed in the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859; her second husband was also an abolitionist.) After briefly reuniting with his mother in Topeka, Kansas, in 1907, Hughes returned to Lawrence to live with his grandmother until her death in 1915. Subsequently he lived with his mother and her second husband in Lincoln, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio. He began to publish poems and stories in school publications. After graduating high school he spent a year with his father in Mexico; relations between the two were stormy, as Hughes’s literary ambitions were strongly opposed by his father. He published the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis in June 1921, and that autumn began attending Columbia University with support from his father (and majoring in engineering at his father’s request); he left Columbia after a year following a break with his father. In Harlem he formed friendships with Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and other writers. A series of odd jobs was followed in 1923 by a job on a steamship which visited ports in West Africa; the following year he worked his way to Europe but jumped ship and remained in Paris, working at a jazz club in Montmartre. He returned to the United States in 1925, living with his mother in Washington, D.C. for a year before settling in Harlem. He continued to befriend many writers, including Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman, and Carl Van Vechten. In 1926 he published his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, as well as the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; a second poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew, appeared the next year. From 1926 to 1929 he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. A wealthy white woman, Charlotte Mason (whom at her request he referred to as “Godmother”), supported him for three years, underwriting trips to Cuba (1930) and Haiti (1931) and encouraging his first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930; the relationship with Mason ended abruptly the same year when she broke with him for reasons not clear to him. Around the same time his friendship with Zora Neale Hurston ended as the result of a quarrel over the authorship of a play, Mulebone, on which they had collaborated. Hughes continued to work prolifically in a range of genres, collaborating with Arna Bontemps on the children’s book Popo and Fifina (1932), and publishing the poetry collections Dear Lovely Death (1931) and The Negro Mother (1931) and the story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). With Louise Thompson and a contingent of African American writers and intellectuals he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 for the purpose of making a film, never realized, about American race relations. He remained in the Soviet Union, traveling widely in Soviet Asia and going in 1933 to China and Japan; he was expelled from Japan for leftist activities and arrived in San Francisco in August 1933. After residences in Carmel, California, and Mexico (where he lived for a time with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson), Hughes returned to New York, where his play Mulatto opened in 1935 despite Hughes’s protests against changes made by the producers. He traveled to Europe and addressed the Paris Writers’ Congress in July 1937, meeting Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, and many others; in Spain, where he reported on the civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American, he stayed for three months in Madrid while it was under siege; the following year he returned to Paris with Theodore Dreiser to address a conference of the International Association of Writers. A collection of radical poems, A New Song, was published in 1938 by the International Workers Order, and the memoir The Big Sea, focusing on his travels in the 1920s, appeared in 1940. In the following year Hughes lived briefly in Los Angeles (where he wrote a film script) and Chicago before settling again in Harlem in 1941. Knopf published the poetry collection Shakespeare in Harlem in 1942. His newspaper column “Here to Yonder,” which began appearing in the Chicago Defender in November 1942, introduced in 1943 the character Jesse B. Semple (“Simple”); these columns were ultimately collected in a popular series of books, beginning with Simple Speaks His Mind (1950). Hughes’s involvement in many left-wing and anti-fascist organizations came under steady right-wing attack during the 1940s and was denounced repeatedly in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Beginning in 1944 he organized national reading tours which helped provide him with financial support. In 1953 he was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-subversive subcommittee, and gave testimony disavowing communism but not implicating any individuals. In addition to the Simple books, Hughes in the postwar period published the poetry collections Fields of Wonder (1947), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Selected Poems (1959), and Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961); the memoir I Wonder As I Wander (1954); the story collection Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952); the novella Tambourines to Glory (1958, based on Hughes’s 1956 musical play); and a series of books for children. He continued to be involved in a range of musical and theatrical projects, collaborating with Kurt Weill on Street Scene (1947) and William Grant Still on Troubled Island (1949). He gave readings of his poetry accompanied by bassist Charles Mingus, published translations of Gabriela Mistral and Federico Garcia Lorca, collaborated with photographer Roy DeCarava on The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), and with Arna Bontemps edited the anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (1949). He was elected in 1961 to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During the 1960s Hughes traveled widely, making repeated visits to Africa and Europe, and participating in a State Department–sponsored tour of Senegal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in 1966. A private man, Hughes never married and is not known to have had a longtime companion. He died of complications following prostate surgery on May 22, 1967. The poetry collection The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times was published posthumously the same year.
Note on the Text
This e-Book is drawn from Library of America's Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s, which collects four novels—Not Without Laughter (1930), by Langston Hughes; Black No More (1931), by George S. Schuyler; The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), by Rudolph Fisher; and Black Thunder (1936), by Arna Bontemps—associated with what has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of great creativity and change in African American cultural life, with its epicenter in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. A companion volume in the Library of America series, Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s, vol. 1, presents five earlier novels: Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929). The texts of all of these novels have been taken from the first printings of the first editions.
Not Without Laughter. Though Langston Hughes had written short stories and two books of poetry—The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)—he was reluctant, at first, to tackle the longer form of the novel. He was encouraged to do so by a new patron, Charlotte Mason, who suggested the goal in August 1927 and then in November added a proposal of financial assistance: she would provide Hughes a regular stipend for a year (or longer, if their arrangement proved successful), freeing him of the need to support himself. Hughes would retain the rights to his work, but in return Mason expected to be regularly apprised of his progress. Accepting Mason’s terms, Hughes finished his junior year at Lincoln University and then began “The Novel” (as his first draft was called) in June 1928. He finished the draft within about six weeks, in mid-August. “At first I did a chapter or two a day,” he later recalled in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), “and revised them the next day. But they seemed bad; in fact, so bad I finally decided to write the whole story straight through to the end before re-reading anything.” Hughes made further revisions to the initial draft during the fall (his hand-corrected typescript bears the date December 19, 1928), but he did not return to full-time work on the book until the summer of 1929, after his graduation. In May 1929, Mason sent Hughes a twenty-four-page letter offering detailed comments on his initial draft, enthus
iastically praising some sections, recommending “literary welding together” for the whole, and at points registering her objections: “the quality of the writing . . . becomes self-conscious, and has the air of the author’s propaganda.” (She also dissuaded him from using the titles So Moves This Swift World and Roots of Dawn; the former, she explained, was “not characteristic enough of you and your writing, which is always original and arresting.”)
One scholar has argued that this “literary censorship” on Mason’s part “forced Hughes to suppress his increasingly strong left-wing political notions in the novel” (see John P. Shields, “‘Never Cross the Divide’: Reconstructing Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter,” African American Review 28.4 [1994]: 601–13). Hughes’s manuscripts of successive drafts of the novel (all of which he donated, after publication, to the Negro Collection of the 135th Street Branch Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) suggest that he did make changes to his work in response to Mason’s suggestions, in the midst of his own thoroughgoing process of revision. Mason herself was happy with Hughes’s second draft, finished on August 15. Hughes—returning from a trip to Canada—insisted it needed more work. (“I couldn’t bear to have the people I had grown to love,” he remembered in The Big Sea, “locked up in long pages of uncomfortable words, awkward sentences, and drawn-out passages.”)
With the help of Louise Thompson, a stenographer Mason had hired to facilitate Hughes’s progress on the novel, he finished a third draft during the fall. Alfred A. Knopf—who had been asked by Carl Van Vechten to extend “every tenderness and consideration” to Hughes’s work—agreed to publish the book. Alain Locke, enlisted by Knopf as a reader, sought further changes after it was accepted (asking for more detail about the protagonist’s “inner emotional conflict” in its later sections), and Mason again noted that “propaganda utterances” had re-emerged in the revised manuscript. Hughes addressed Locke and Mason’s suggestions and gave his finished manuscript to Blanche Knopf on February 17, 1930. Hughes read galleys and page proofs with great care, reversing many small changes in spelling and the handling of dialect that had been introduced by Knopf’s copy editor and making a few further revisions. Not Without Laughter was published in July 1930. Knopf reprinted the novel at least nine times during Hughes’s lifetime, without Hughes’s involvement. The present volume prints the text of the 1930 Knopf first printing.
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