Big Sea

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes #13

by Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka (Introduction)

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, African American, Classics, Poetry, Autobiography

335 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1940

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...

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books--where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas. And where almost always the mortgage got paid off, the good knights won, and the Alger boy triumphed.”


This is one of my favorite author pictures. What an engaging smile! It is almost impossible not to smile back at him.

I think it is hard to know where we are supposed to be. People have spent lifetimes searching the planet for the place that speaks to them in ways that makes them never want to leave. Few find paradise, but eventually, most people discover that they can make a good life for themselves almost anywhere. Langston Hughes found misery in Kansas, but he also found a way to escape it. He discovered books. I love that line: “books began to happen to me.”

I don’t think that Langston Hughes would have ever been a writer, a poet, or a world traveller if he had never been a reader. Books fueled the flame for him to be all of those things and more. It drove him to go to Paris, to Africa, to Harlem, and many parts beyond. All of that began for a young boy in Lawrence, Kansas, who discovered the world was large enough for him to find a place that would want him to be there as much as he wanted to be there.

”Life is a big sea
full of many fish.
I let down my nets
and pull.”

Anthony Bourdain included Langston Hughes’s book I Wonder as I Wander on a list of his favorite books. Those books may not be the best books you’ve ever read (they can be both) but are the comfort books that you can return to time and time again and enjoy the book as much or more than you did the first time you read it. When I looked into I Wonder as I Wander, I realized that it was the second autobiographical travel book he’d written. From a linear time standpoint, it made sense to read The Big Sea first. Besides, it also covered his time in Kansas, which is of special interest to me.

When he travelled to Africa, working as a crew member of a freight ship, he had expectations of Africa.

”And further down the coast it was more like the Africa I had dreamed about--wild and lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright, and the rivers deep. The great Africa of my dreams!

But there was one that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro.

You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are a lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word ‘Negro’ is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black.”

In America, he was discriminated against for being too dark, and in Africa, he was dismissed as a “white man” for being too light. As he traveled across the United States, he often found it convenient to say he was Hispanic (he could pass...a word that makes me shiver even to write it), and while living in Mexico with his father is probably when the idea first occurred to him. His father “hated negroes” and “disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.”


James Hughes hated negroes, but he is….

According to Langston, his father moved to Mexico because of the problems existing for biracial people in the United States. James was also absolutely obsessed with money, not spending it or enjoying having it, but piling it up like Scrooge McDuck. As if Langston wasn’t struggling enough with figuring out his place in this wacky world of mental color charts, he had to have a dad who was suffering from so much self-loathing that he was racist against himself.

Langston found a place for himself in Harlem during the Black Renaissance in the 1920s. Josephine Baker, even though she was in Paris, was influencing the way black women and white women dressed back in America. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, among many others, were driving jazz music to greater and greater heights. He met fellow writers Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, and became good friends with Carl Van Vechten, who was instrumental in encouraging him to write The Big Sea and other projects that eventually proved important for Langston’s writing.

Carl Van Vechten was famous for throwing these huge parties in which he brought writers, artists, and musicians together regardless of their skin color. He wrote a peppy book about these events titled...>Parties, and if you want a real slice of how people had a good time in the 1920s, that book will give you a peek inside those historic gatherings. I will soon be reading and reviewing Van Vechten’s book Nigger Heaven, which caused a huge controversy when it was published. It was condemned by many for the title before they ever read the book. Knowing what I know about Van Vechten (he is the opposite of racist), I must say I’m intrigued by where the book will take me. The book went into multiple printings. The current edition of the book is published by the University of Illinois which might signify a cultural importance. Black and white people were wrapping the book in cloth so they wouldn’t be seen reading the book, but as we know, controversy for a book is sometimes better than good press.


Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes wrote a very engaging story. He lived during a time when so many wonderful things were happening. African-Americans were not only proving that they were equal to any, but that they were also capable of great genius. I followed along with Langston all over the world and enjoyed my stay wherever he took me. He worked the most menial jobs as he tried to teach himself how to write poems and stories. He had a goal, not to be rich, but to be influential.”I think it was de Maupassant who made me really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them--even after I was dead.” Mission accomplished Langston!

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[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst.

Recall the boom of the 1920s, the one we think about when we remember the splash of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Now think of how those years affected the Harlem Renaissance, an era which brought with it important contributions to American literature, an era we don't hear about too often. Alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and others, were: Hughes, Thurman, Fauset, Locke, Hurston, Toomer, McKay, and others. Some were African Americans who had migrated from the slave bonds of the American south, so they could live free in the north. Once in New York, they realized that African Americans weren't allowed to buy homes, and the rent in other places were set extremely high to keep them out of certain neighborhoods, so when Harlem opened its door to free African American slaves, this is where they called home, and this is where they created art; hence, the Harlem Renaissance:

Put down the 1920s for the rise of Roland Hayes, who packed Carnegie Hall, the rise of Paul Robeson in New York and London, of Florence Mills over two continents, of Rose McClendon in Broadway parts…the booming voice of Bessie Smith…

Put down the 1920's for Louis Armstrong and Gladys Bentley and Josephine Baker.

Langston Hughes says it was de Maupassant who made him want to become a writer. Well, it was Hughes who made me start to appreciate poetry as art and song and language worthy of studying. There I was, sitting in an American Lit II class in undergrad, fuming because I had a headache and my professor was droning, until finally he got to the point and told us to open the text to this Hughes poem; my pulse quickened:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

(Note: The proper line spacing format for this poem doesn't work well with GR)

There's nothing I like more than lucid words written with some abstraction, leaving the reader with much to be interpreted, imagery to astound, subtlety that speaks of much more than what is on the surface. Hughes wrote this when he was feeling down: he was headed to live with his estranged father in Mexico, and his mother refused to speak to him or say goodbye because of this. Hughes' father was a lawyer who was not allowed to get a law license in the American South, because he was a black man, so he migrated to Mexico, where he was able to become a wealthy business man. Disappointed in America and disappointed at his own people, Hughes' father decided to send for his son so that he could find his way. However, Hughes was drawn to the Harlem Renaissance and its people. He wrote the poem on the ship, as he sat there gazing at the old Mississippi River, wondering what "it had meant to Negroes in the past - how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave in times of bondage…"

I liked the simple and direct prose, each chapter has the feel of a short story. However, Hughes didn't like memoirs, he was pressured into writing this one while in his late thirties and this you sense, for instead of finding the deep waters of a memoirist, Hughes prefers to remain at the shallow end - which can be a bit unnerving. For instance, you insinuate that he and Zora Neale Hurston had an intimate relationship that soured because of him, but he never says this directly. There are many more scenes like this.

I'm so glad I picked up this memoir because I learned a lot. For instance, I didn't know that during the war, with Americanism a stressed issue, students were called and questioned in the principal's office about their belief in Americanism, and police went to some of Hughes' friends' homes to take their books away (what type of books, he didn't say). I didn't know that Mexicans were served at restaurants in America, allowed in "white only" train carriages, while African-Americans were shooed away. I also learned a lot from accompanying Hughes through his travels in Europe and Africa and the distinctions he drew; like Baldwin stressed in his Notes of a Native Son, Hughes realized how different things were in Europe because each time he returned to America, he was reminded of segregation and "whites only" bathrooms and eateries.

In Europe people of all races meet and eat and drink and talk and dance and do whatever they are meeting to do without self-consciousness. But here, when there are Negroes and whites present together, there is often an amazing amount of gushing, of blundering, or commiserating, of talking pro and con, of theorizing and excusing, and somebody is almost sure to bring up the question of intermarriage, and then everyone looks intense, interested, and apprehensive.

Yes, this book deals with race in America, which unfortunately, is still a touchy subject in America, but it is also primarily about literature and the arts - the contributions of classic works by African American writers. By dissecting his twenties as a young, black, up-and-coming poet in Harlem, Hughes' book is a beacon for understanding the 1920s in America, those memorable years, and what they mean when one considers American Literature.

Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books - where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas. And where almost always the mortgage got paid off, the good knights won, and the Alger boy triumphed.

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Topeka, as a small child, my mother took me with her to the little vine-covered library on the grounds of the Capitol. There I first fell in love with the librarians, and I have been in love with them ever since–those very nice women who help you find wonderful books! The silence inside the library, the big chairs, and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it–all of that made me love it. And right then, even before I was six, books began to happen to me, so that after a while, there came a time when I believed in books more than in people–which, of course, was wrong. That was why, when I went to Africa, I threw all the books into the sea.- Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

I love Langston Hughes so much. He was the first poet I felt I could really relate to on an emotional level. As I have a habit of reading books out of order I accidentally read his second autobiography years ago first. So from meeting Hughes as a mature and established writer, poet, and traveller in I Wonder as I Wander, I went backwards and met him as a teenager starting off on his career. It was a fun read, a funny one at times. I always love to learn about how writers, poets, artists etc are made. Hughes, from his writing, seems like such a personable man and it was fun to read about his adventures: how will he survive in Paris with no money? What will happen to him after he gets mugged in Italy? Will he ever get into university?

His travels were really interesting, and reading about them and the influence he got for writing, was quite cool. He wrote his poem The Negro Speaks of River while on the train looking out onto the Mississippi and thinking about what the river had meant to African-Americans, and that led him to think about other rivers in Africa.

Hughes visited Africa before the continent gained its independence and I liked reading the old names and spellings of the countries:

"Along the West Coast we visited some thirty-two ports, from Dakar in Senegal to Loanda in the South. The Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, Lagos, the Niger, the Bight of Benin, and the Slave Coast, Calabar, the Kamerun, Boma up the Congo, where we moored to a gigantic tree, and our last port, San Paolo de Loanda in Portuguese Angola.”

The black literati in in the 1920s is such a fascinating topic to me. Apart from accidentally reading books in order, I also have the gift of somehow knowing which books to read in tandem that will increase my knowledge. While reading this, I was also reading Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night , and it struck me how differently the black and white Americans living in France lived. Fitzgerald’s Americans were privileged and knew it; Hughes’ Americans (and himself) seemed more real.

The Harlem Renaissance introduced us to Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurstom, Countee Cullen, among others. It was the time Hughes says “the Negro was in vogue”, when black books, plays, and music were in high demand:

"It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface in

To end this review, here’s some great advice Hughes was given by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay:

Do not let any lionizers stampede you. Hide and write and study and think. I know what factions do. Beware of them. I know what flatterers do. Beware of them. I know what lionizers do. Beware of them.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only read a small portion of the art form Langston Hughes is mainly known for: his poetry. However, at the same time, I've still read his work: a novel ('Not Without Laughter'), a book of short stories ('The Ways of White Folks') and a later-in-life memoir ('I Wonder as I Wander'). What I've read so far is already a fine body of work. And I know I'll have to get around to exploring more of the poems, etc. - because I want to. 

But, in the meantime, this formal autobiography is another solid piece in the Langston lineup. It's simple, straightforward, no frills; clear-eyed, compassionate, and wise. With its generosity of spirit, it's a work that simply makes you feel good for having read it. 

Essentially, Hughes covers his life in 3 sections: The Early Years with family (and of vagabond travels); Africa / Paris (still with odd jobs); NYC (and the abstruse road to recognition). 

What seems evident with the read is how little his character appears to have altered - or needed to be - once his core beliefs were set in place. Specifically, Hughes seemed all-too-aware of how little he had as a child. While there are those who might then spend subsequent years running in the opposite direction, in search of 'plenty', Hughes seemed to embrace his background as something that could keep him humble. He seemed forever drawn to the past he was most familiar with. For example, while he was spending a bit of time visiting friends in Italy:

I got a little tired of palaces and churches and famous paintings and English tourists. And I began to wonder if there were no back alleys in Venice and no poor people and no slums and nothing that looked like the districts down by the markets on Woodland Avenue in Cleveland, where the American Italians lived. So I went off by myself a couple of times and wandered around in sections not stressed in the guide books.

As well, when he was in Washington DC, what he observed there triggered a natural distaste for internalized racism:

To me it did not seem good, for the "better class" Washington colored people, as they called themselves, drew rigid class and color lines within the race against Negroes who worked with their hands, or were dark in complexion and had no degrees from colleges. ... They were on the whole as unbearable and snobbish a group of people as I have ever come in contact with anywhere. ... [they] seemed to me altogether lacking in real culture, kindness, or good common sense.

Ultimately, Hughes' formative years (and a good deal of his whole life, actually) were focused on equality - a hurdle refashioned for him by way of the 'color line' at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and about which he wrote for a sociological study at the school:

In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every movement of life becomes a part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the truth of the physical for the sake of the mind. Nor do they teach with speech alone, but rather with all the acts of life. There are no books, so the barrier between words and reality is not so great as with us. The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world.

That statement seems the perfect summary of how Hughes lived his life. And damn if it ain't poetry!

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well this autobiography isn’t the revelatory kind, and Langston Hughes never really let’s the reader inside his mind, and in fact once the story of his life passes a point in his teen years we hardly know of the complex relationships with his friends and contemporaries as we do with his family members, so that some of the big incidents, such as his friendship and infamous fallout with Zora Neale Hurston, are not really explored. Which I think is fine, not many people would want that, myself included, that is to open oneself to an audience risking judgement and misunderstanding or potentially, as some presumed with Hughes, telling truths about yourself you’d rather not say. At some point near the end this becomes a setting-things-right kind of narrative, as Hughes explains certain facts about his work and relationships with other artists, such as Carl Van Vechten, specifically the accusations that he was engaged in racist stereotyping in his work to reach a white audience.

This is wonderfully written and a great historical document of a period in time that’s long vanished, that brought with it the Harlem Renaissance and all that wonderful art that remains as residue to that vanished world. Also, interestingly, although Hughes is mostly regarded as having been asexual, I was surprised to read of his loves of his youth, and of the beautiful girls he was enamoured with in his youth. This autobiography is also an admirable account of an artist who grew up in hardship, who rebelled against the wishes of his affluent father for him as a more stable and financially rewarding career in mining, and instead dedicated himself to poetry and art, despite all the hardship and uncertainty, to the very end.

The one most valuable detail of this autobiography though, to me, is an account of the balls happening in 1920s New York.

Strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the ’20’s, and still the strangest and gaudiest, is the annual Hamilton Club Lodge Ball at Rockland Palace Casino. I once attended as a guest of A’Lelia Walker. It is the ball where men dress as women and women dress as men. During the height of the New Negro era and the tourist invasion of Harlem, it was fashionable for the intelligentsia and social leaders of both Harlem and the downtown area to occupy boxes at this ball and look down from above at the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor, males in flowing gowns and feathered headdresses and females in tuxedoes and box-back suits.

For the men, there is a fashion parade. Prizes are given to the most gorgeously gowned of the whites and Negroes who, powdered, wigged, and rouged, mingle and compete for the awards. From the boxes these men look for all the world like very pretty chorus girls parading across the raised platform in the center of the floor. But close up, most of them look as if they need a shave, and some of their evening gowns, cut too low, show hair on the chest.

The pathetic touch about the show is given by the presence there of many former “queens” of the ball, prize winners of years gone by, for this dance has been going on a long time, and it is very famous among the male masqueraders of the eastern seaboard, who come from Boston and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlantic City to attend. These former queens of the ball, some of them aged men, still wearing the costumes that won for them a fleeting fame in years gone by, stand on the sidelines now in their same old clothes—wide picture hats with plumes, and out-of-style dresses with sweeping velvet trains. And nobody pays them any mind—for the spotlights are focused on the stage, where today’s younger competitors, in their smart creations, bid for applause.

One of the reasons why this is mightily important, is that it shows that queer people have always been there. A show of drag queens and drag kings (although these terms aren’t used in the book), which still exists today with the Black American and Latino balls whose influence have become mainstream, being documented long before a RuPaul’s drag race existed (late 2000s-to date), or Madonna’s Vogue (1990), or the Paris is Burning documentary (1990), or when Crystal Labeija in protest of unfairness and racism, infamously broke out and established balls that were primarily Black (1967). To think that Langston said “the dance has been going for a long time” speaking of something he witnessed in the 1920s is incredible, and how sad there’s gaps before and after this that largely went undocumented, but how fortunate that he did record this.

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first of two autobiographies by Langston Hughes, this one was published in 1940 and covers the poet's childhood and life through the decade of the 20's. I had heard of Langston Hughes before, but had never read his work. I saw his name mentioned as an influence on the author of a book I read a few years ago and became curious enough to order his two autobiographies, thinking I wanted to get to know the man before I tried his poetry.

I'm glad I chose that path, because now when I have library access again and find myself a volume of his poems, I think that by knowing the things he shares about his life here I will understand better what he will be saying in his poems. I hope so anyway.

In this book Hughes talks about his relationship with his father, who left the family and lived in Mexico in order to escape the bigotry and color line in the United States. Langston spent some years with him after finishing high school. But he then went to New York, tried college, worked on a cargo ship that went to Africa, lived in Paris, then eventually returned to New York and after a few years decided finally and definitely to earn his living as a writer.

He was an angry young man, and some of the poems he shares here reflect that. Angry about the way Negroes were treated at the time, angry about society in general. And I think he would be just as angry if he could see the state of things in the world today.

In a chapter that discussed author Jean Toomey was one of the most powerful statements for me in the book:
"But when we get as democratic in America as we pretend we are on days when we wish to shame Hitler, nobody will bother much about anybody else's race anyway."

Will human beings ever learn to ignore the shell and see the pearl inside?!

Time alone will tell.

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first time in a great while that instead of just a quick review or impression, I've wanted to write a real summary of a book. I am actually two full pages into one and have only gotten up to his early high school years. But I'm just going to stop, and maybe do an essay over on my blog. A GoodReads review for me is best kept brief to remind myself of what really impressed or annoyed me, to prod my memory of a book later. But something tells me I won't have a problem remembering this one.

Born in 1901, Hughes was a black child in Jim Crow America. Though he saw and felt the hardships of the precariousness of black existence, circumstances also let him see the big wide world beyond the quotidian oppression and prejudice of the times. He was open-minded and social, hustled and helped his family, resilient and seemingly impervious to many of the ways whites would try to humiliate or harm him or his family.

He'd jump onto ships as a mess boy for work, unafraid to try new things. He went to Paris with $7 in his pocket and came home the following year with a monkey and a quarter, saying his trip only cost him $6.75 (a lot of living and learning in between). His first book of poems was published when he was working in a "wet laundry" - basically scrubbing the nastiest dirty laundry in the ghetto of Washington DC. He talks of his days in Harlem in the Twenties during the Renaissance, attending college on scholarship, having white patrons, his relationship with Nora Zeale Hurston and many others.

A self-portrait of the writer and poet as a young man, he wrote it in his late 30s (it was published when he was 39), it's breathtaking how quickly life came at him and how ready he was for it. I love the way he talks about his work, rereading the few poems he includes, the hows and whys of them, also the circumstances and criticisms of some of his work.

A very interesting read, filled with clear language and vivid images of people, places and situations. I’ve discovered he put out a second volume called I Wonder as I Wander, so I will definitely put that on my TBR.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled.” This is the autobiography that Langston Hughes wrote in 1940 when he was about thirty eight. He writes of his teenage years and early writing career, travels aboard various ships, but the most interesting aspect is his firsthand account of the Harlem Renaissance and his relationships with other authors and artists. It is written in an episodic manner and is not particularly “literary” (unlike “Not without laughter”), however, is very readable. About 3.5 stars.

[Damien · Rating 2 out of 5]

His life seemed pretty interesting but it bored me to read the way he wrote about it. Especially when he started name dropping during the Harlem Renaissance. It seems that he can give me no idea what was so good about it. I've always wondered what the story behind the rift between him and Zora Neale Hurston was, and still, I feel like he was evading the issue with vagueness and subtle misogyny. Actually, he was pretty vague on just about everything in his life. One of his reviewers wrote: "Langston Hughes displays his unusual ability to say nothing in many words". That was exactly how I felt. On the other hand, it was like having a friend who babbles nonstop and the only reason to put up with it is because on many occasions that friend will say something brilliant and amazing.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is basically a chronological list of the places Hughes went. There is little perspective on the times and really very little self analysis. The part of this book that I expected to be the most interesting to me was the last third about the Harlem Renaissance. However, even that was primarily name dropping.

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to give this a try after reading Hughes' other travel book, I Wonder as I Wander. I think I liked that one better, but this was still enjoyable. It made me realize that the Harlem Renaissance was a bit like Swinging London and Seattle in the nineties. By the time most of the world got hip to "the scene," the locals considered it ruined. It was only whites that hung out at the Cotton Club as it enforced a color line off stage.

He spent a lot of time amongst the intellectual elite as well as regular people. It seemed he much preferred the latter, and he actually performed menial jobs in a laundry and as a cabin boy on several ships (he preferred that to the academic assistant job he had). At one point, his wallet was stolen in Genoa. The American Embassy was no help at all and he had to join a band of homeless beggars on the wharf to survive. This seemed to go on for several months until someone was able to rescue him.

[Jamey Boelhower · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was interesting to hear about Langston's life from his perspective. His travels, joys, and heartaches allow us to understand how his life influenced his works.

[Carla Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful surprise this book was! I kept putting off starting it because I thought it was going to be a tough slog emotionally but it was just the opposite. Hughes' way of watching, and participating in, the world was absolutely liberating for me. No claustrophobic sense of self here, only openness to what was really going on at any given moment and a curiosity unbound. I felt like I was along for the ride the whole way. It was fascinating to see through his eyes and it helped me adjust my own historical sense. On top of all that, it was cool to have a protagonist who was more like me than not, racially but also in terms of point of view. As much as I love to read other people's perspectives, I also crave (and rarely receive) the gift of a like-minded protagonist. I didn't expect to find one here and was thrilled that my expectations were wrong.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick and fabulously readable memoir-introduction to Langston Hughes' journey as a writer and his life as it unfolded through the 1920's and the Harlem Renaissance. What a brave, honest and talented human! Favorite quote: "I always do as I want, preferring to kill myself in my own way rather than die of boredom trying to live according to somebody else's 'good advice'."

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! What a journey! So glad to have spent time with this one and learn more about his formative experiences and who he was before the Harlem Renaissance. I also appreciated his critiques of "middle class" Black Americans. This is a book I think everyone should read, especially those interested in charting their own paths to reach their goals.

[Cam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating witness account of the 1910s and 1920s interspersed with Hughes' beautiful poems and occasionally sprinkled with of-its-time sexism and patronising essentialist accounts of "primitive Africa" to keep your eye muscles exercised.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Descriptive autobiography. Little reflection. Hughes is a genial companion.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author and poet recounts the early years of his life; a lot of poverty, lack of a father figure, but also dreams of an artistic life, a life filled with music, poetry, art and literature; be sure to check out the follow-up autobiography, about his peregrinations into the USSR and continental Europe; I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Kristin Nolt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Langston Hughes and the world scene during his coming-of-age.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Langston Hughes travels a bit and comments on the state of the Harlem Renaissance in "The Big Sea." It is interesting to note the reception he gets in other countries as compared to America. Why he chose to keep returning to the USA is a bit of a mystery since he really seemed to enjoy traveling and being immersed in other cultures.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very fine memoir, among the finest one can read by a 20th century American. It is crisp, observant, thoughtful, unique and beautifully written. It belongs in the neighborhood of A Moveable Feast, though with less spite or regretful nostalgia, and perhaps not quite as finely written but very close.

The memoir covers a relatively short period of Hughes’s life, primarily as a high school and college student to the point he establishes himself as a poet and journalist in the mid-1930s. (The book was published in 1940.) There are also flashbacks to earlier years in his growing up, including time spent in Mexico with a domineering but aloof father. Perhaps best of all The Big Sea is also an interrupted sea story for Hughes, like O’Neill and Melville before him, went to sea as Ishmael did, to work his passage to places he wanted to see and to avoid falling into that mood that Melville’s protagonist noted where he was tempted to go about knocking people’s hats off their offending heads.

Beyond oceans and continents, Hughes also managed to travel across various lines of caste and cause. He worked as a busboy and sea cook but was well, if incompletely, educated and through his poetry had access to the educated black elite and, eventually, to America’s literary mansion, the black wing with some adjoining rooms to non-hyphenated rooms. His poems were appearing in The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, and in noticed anthologies, so he could be at fancy dinners in D.C. or New York, but then disappear on a tramp steamer bound for Africa and then Paris. In Paris he could be penniless and get a job in a jazz club kitchen doing dishes but connect with musicians and writers and visiting African American notables. Significant figures such as Walter White, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Van Vechten, Jean Toomer, Vachel Lindsay, Paul Robeson and others make significant appearances. He attends parties where Jimmy Walker, the O’Neills, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, and others are among the guests.

He had benefactors and patrons, black and white, but long moments of personal struggle and private difficulty. He had a problematic relationship with his father and a not very close one with his mother. The book is filled with wonderful descriptions of people, places, music, conflicts, life at sea, and writing. It has a memorable beginning, Hughes departing New York as a cook on a freighter dumping a sack of books into the harbor, signifying the end of one form of education and the beginning of another, and concludes with chapters on the rise and fall of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s brilliant.

[Lanier · Rating 5 out of 5]

4-8-09
Finally decided to do my final essay for my Masters on the man I've idolized since I was 13. I don't know what took me so long.

Anyway, just like his "Jesse B. Semple" short articles that showed the word the simplistic injustices through an "everyman's" everyman, Hughes writes his autobiography in the plainest of terms, yet, like Simple, extremely poignant, funny and painful.

I've only just begun my journeys through the halls of another writer trying to find place and identity within and without America. The most painful line so far, and there are a myriad of them to choose from is: The Africans looked at me and would like believe that I was a Negro (page 11). This, after feeling abandoned by a wayward father and a selfish mother, having graduated from college and on a merchant ship to feel "at home" for once in the old country, only to be once again, "left out in the cold" from "Empty House" in Simple's Uncle Sam.

There is so much out there left to be seen, some of it can be learned from Hughes because there hasn't been anyone to come along like him in more than 40 years.

May 5
Finished earlier this weekend, some awesome insights into "black"lash when some major black critics of his day panned his second book of poems, New Clothes For the Jew, which he admitted was inappropriately mis-titled, but appropos to the downtrodden pawning their clothing to get money for food. They were equally as upset as the Jews, about Hughes's honest portrayal of black living conditions. These critics believed he was "Uncle Tom"ming the black race with his honesty, not revealing the better side of the race. However, we are all good, bad and indifferent. I do understand their anger and their concerns, knowing only through literature and films what they were dealing with, yet, Hughes was all about celebrating truth and love, no matter how sad, depressing or "ugly" it may be.

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting! Of course a poet is the perfect author for an autobiography, although much of his storytelling isn't quite as whimsical as one might expect...and neither is his poetry for that matter. No, he's more of a social and, you might even say, politically minded fellow.
It's moving the deep love he had for his culture and race and the pride he feels in frequently referring to himself and others as "Negroes". The pieces of his life included in this book reflect a bit on the hardships of his time, when racism was still strongly condoned legally as well as socially, but it's clear the push these struggles have had on him to press on and follow his dreams and the beauty he had found in coming to know himself for who he was.
I feel so inspired by this book, but I also can't help but feel disconnected. This book certainly doesn't create, but rather illuminates to me the feeling and realization that I will never in all my life be able to truly empathize with those who were and are victims of racism.
I feel that this book is important. Written humbly, giving personal and objective reflections of an inspiring time period, this book is a challenge to all to face what they think can't be overcome.

[Augustus Jasmin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It had been along time since I’d read Langston Hughes, and I mostly remembered the greatest hits: the Weary Blues, A Negro Dreams Rivers, the Simple stories. This book provided lots of context and changed how I saw the author and the Harlem Renaissance. I didn’t realize what an adventurous life he led, jumping from country to country with just a few bucks in his pocket, or how young he was when he wrote many of his seminal works. My image of him was very “dignified,“ and I never pictured him visiting brothels with other sailors, being hazed in fraternity rituals, or having beef with Zora Neal Hurston (the greatest of the Renaissance writers, IMHO.) If they ever invent a time machine, I want to visit Harlem circa 1925, if only for a little while. (Anytime before 1980 is a little questionable for black folk, ha ha.)

[Jordyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in the eighth grade. I was writing a research paper on Langston Hughes and checked this book out as a resource. I never expected to fall in love with Hughes. Reading his words, it felt like someone understood me, a silly black gay preacher's son from Chicago. Likewise, I felt like I understood him, even at 13 and nowhere near experienced in life as Hughes was when he wrote this autobiography.

[tri · Rating 5 out of 5]

On page 310, Langston Hughes writes: “I began to think back to Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Fred Douglass—folks who left no buildings behind them—only a wind of words fanning the bright flame of the spirit down the dark lanes of time.”

I hope he knows, somehow, that he is right there with them fanning that flame.

[Efrem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is for everyone who ever doubted their own greatness. It takes a bit of struggle and pain, but you can make it. It's a great big sea out there, waiting for you.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding story of how a major African American poet found his voice.

[Cynthia Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful retelling of life at sea and the Harlem Renaissance from someone willing to share his inner thoughts -- it was easy to put myself in that time and place from more than a century ago even with people so vastly different from my world. Langston Hughes is better known for his poetry, but this story of his life gives you a vision of what life experiences aided in forming his artistry --or was it is artistic approach to life experiences that propelled him to pursue all these adventures... In any case, for an American black man to grow up in Kansas, live in Mexico, travel to Africa by boat, witness the budding career of Josephine Baker in Paris, secure patronage via interaction with a customer in Washington, DC and have a honored seat at all the Harlem grand festivities of the 1920's and his life was not yet half over, would take incredible imagination as a literary work, and yet it was his life. The book ends a bit on a melancholy note as he recounts his falling out with the wealthy NYC patron who had supported his first book publishing -- a conflict resulting from a racial stereotype that is not unlike what we are still struggling with today.