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The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes. New York. 1969. Knopf. 248 pages. November 1969.

 

Stories of the intersections of black and white life in America. As timely today as when the book was published in 1934.

ways of white folksFROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

    Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and '30s aware of the black culture thriving in its midst. Like his most famous poems, Hughes's stories are messages from that other America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites. Here is the ailing black musician who comes home from Europe to die in his small town--only to die more quickly and brutally than he had imagined. Here are the wealthy bohemians who collect Negroes like so many objets d'art. the moonlighting student who becomes the reluctant confidante of a boozy white Don Juan. the elegant charlatan who peddles 'real, primitive jazz out of Africa' as a nostrum to the spiritually starved elite. Filled with mordant wit and human detail, The Ways of White Folks is unmistakably the work of a great poet who was also a shrewd and compelling storyteller.

 

Hughes Langston Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.’

 



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