<div>Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.<br><br>Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In <i>The Big Sea</i> 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."<br><br>Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to <i>The Big Sea</i>, 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."<br></div>