The Big Sea: An Autobiography

Langston Hughes · Arnold Rampersad

Jul 2011 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Dominic Hoffman

About this audiobook

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."

Cover design by Sara Eisenman. Cover photograph by Roy DeCarava © Sherry Turner DeCarava

About the author

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a writer of astonishing range. Poetry, fiction, plays, autobiography, essays, libretti for operas and Broadway musicals, and cantatas - work streamed from his desk. It is as a poet though, that he is best known, and his place at the center of Harlem Renaissance was enormously influential. He was the first African-American to write civil-rights protest poetry, as well as the first to use jazz and the blues as a basis for a literary style. Few poets have ever potrayed so vividly the black experience, its triumphs and travails, and in a language that cunningly dramatizes the folk vernacular. Hughes was born in Missouri, worked as a manual laborer and traveled the world - the better, in the end, to know so intimately the realities of urban life for the displaced and rootless. He wrote with eloquence, humor and a deep humanity.

"A poet," he once wrote, "is a human being. Each human being must live within his time, with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country." Hughes wrote of the drama of his time with a sense of truth that continues to startle and move.