Laurie F. Leach. Langston Hughes: A Biography

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Robert Butler

Laurie F. Leach. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2004. 176 pp. $29.95.

Laurie Leach's compact biography of Langston Hughes is part of a series designed for high schools and public libraries and is intended "specifically for student use" (ix). Lucidly written and solidly researched, it achieves its expressed purposes and will be a useful tool for high school students and faculty for many years to come.

Regarding Hughes as "the most prominent African American poet of the twentieth century" (xiii), Leach makes excellent use of previous biographical studies of Hughes by Arnold Rampersad and Faith Berry as well as a broad range of literary responses to Hughes's poetry from early reviewers to contemporary critics. The result is a carefully balanced study of Hughes's life and times, one free from any narrow thesis or critical agenda that might otherwise distort Hughes's art.

Leach is careful not to oversimplify Hughes's character either by romanticizing him or underestimating him. She rightly stresses the paradoxical nature of his personality as one who had a Whitmanian tendency to celebrate the "people" but who in his own life was essentially a loner. While Hughes had several romantic relationships with women and who sometimes portrayed himself as unlucky in love, he always drew back rather deliberately from these relationships when marriage became a possibility. His close friendships with Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and Ralph Ellison eventually fizzled out, as did his relationships with white patrons such as Noel Sullivan and Charlotte Osgood Mason. Throughout his life, Hughes cultivated a public persona as a warmly democratic poet who would bring together the rich assortment of people in America, yet, as Leach stresses, he had a life-long tendency "to hold himself aloof," perhaps to protect himself from "emotional vulnerability" and preserve his "creative independence" (79).

Leach demonstrates Hughes's paradoxical desire both to identify with groups and somehow remain separate from them in her carefully nuanced discussion of his political involvements. During the 1920s and 30s he became strongly committed to leftist causes such as freeing the Scottsboro boys and fighting against fascism in Spain, and he enthusiastically praised Stalin's communist state after an extended tour of the Soviet Union. But he never became a member of the Communist Party and kept his distance from other officially organized political groups. (His trip to Russia in 1932 ended, significantly, with him breaking away from his group and traveling back to the United States alone.) Although he was a life-long opponent of segregation and envisioned a racially integrated America in many of his best poems, Hughes was hesitant to become actively and publicly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Leach points out that Hughes "never emerged as a prominent civil rights leader" (139), participating in relatively few demonstrations and turning down Martin Luther King's offer to join him in the Selma March. Hughes, who "disapproved of Black Nationalism and was dismayed by infighting among civil rights groups" (144), preferred in his later years to take an individual stand against American racism in his newspaper columns and poetry such as The Panther and the Lash. Leach traces the roots of Hughes's "fierce independence" (5) to his childhood, which she describes as "bereft of light and warmth" (1). His father left the family shortly after Hughes was born, and their relationship was always deeply conflicted. His mother never understood his desire to be a writer and was often absent from his life as she pursued her own interests in a variety of locations. He was raised mainly by an elderly grandmother who died when he was 13, leaving him with a feeling of being "abandoned" (4). To make matters worse, he grew up in white neighborhoods, went to predominantly white schools, and sometimes felt himself an "outsider in the black community" (3). It was not until he went to Harlem in 1921 that Hughes could feel himself an integral part of African American life, something that he celebrated throughout his entire writing career.

My one complaint about the book concerns its proportions. Given its compact size and its non-specialized audience, it seems hard to justify Leach's very detailed chapter on Hughes's much-discussed battles with Zora Neale Hurston over the composition of Mule Bone. It is also difficult to see the need for Leach's even more detailed discussion of Hughes's spotty work in film and theatre when his main achievement was in poetry and fiction. (Although Hughes was once advised by Arna Bontemps to "stop fooling around with theatre," he never could take the advice of his good friend.) It would be useful to have much more analysis of his major works, connecting them more firmly to Hughes's life and times.

These quibbles aside, Langston Hughes: A Biography is a solid achievement. It will be of considerable use not only to high school students and teachers but also general readers interested in deepening their knowledge of a major African American writer.