<b>A publishing event: for the first time ever, a glorious comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the canonical African American author-a virtual "life in letters," showcasing his struggles and extraordinary achievement.</b><br><br>This unprecedented collection of Langston Hughes's letters is arranged by decades, with helpful interstitial material and notes throughout to guide us through Hughes's journey in all its aspects: literary, personal, political, practical. His correspondents include such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright. The letters tell the story of a writer finding his voice; struggling with how to support himself in a literary career; reaching out to students in segregated schools in the South; using his artistic clout in the service of the disenfranchised or wrongly accused; and discovering, above all, that as an African American writer in a segregated America, his only true freedom was to be found on the page. Photographs and quotes from the poetry enliven the volume and give a fuller picture of this generous, visionary, and gratifyingly good man who was a genius of modern American letters.