Not Without Laughter: A Novel

by Langston Hughes

In an "eye-opening portrait of the artist as a young black man in the Midwest," the Harlem Renaissance poet made his fiction debut with this 1930 novel (A. Scott Berg, The New York Times Book Review ).

A moving depiction of African American family life, Not Without Laughter is the coming-of-age story of Sandy Rogers as he navigates growing up in a racially divided small town in Kansas. With a mother who works as a housekeeper for a rich white family and a musician father who travels the country in search of work, Sandy's family struggles against poverty and discrimination in a novel that "moves as swiftly as a jazz rhythm" (The New York Times), rendering an indelible portrait of the Black experience in America in the years leading up to World War I.

"Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th century American literature. . . . A powerful interpreter of the American experience." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

129 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 1, 2026

About the author

Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).

People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...