Charles W. Chesnutt to Langston Hughes, 12 January 1932
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January 12, 1932
Mr. Langston Hughes,
C/o The Crisis,1
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Langston,
I wish to thank you very much indeed for the signed copies of your "Dear Lovely Death"2 and "The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations,"3 which you were good enough to send me. The whole family have read them with interest and pleasure, and have found them replete with dramatic interest and poetic feeling.
We have read of your enterprise.4 It suggests the wandering minstrel of medieval times. You ought, at the conclusion of your journeys, to be able to write a book something like "The Romany Rye" or "The Broad Highway."5
I should have acknowledged the first book sooner, but did not know where to address you.
With best wishes for your future success and happiness,
Yours sincerely,Correspondent: Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a Black writer and political activist, one of the younger and most famous members of the Harlem Renaissance. Originally from Missouri, he lived in a series of Midwestern towns, including Cleveland, and graduated from Cleveland Central High School in June 1920. His Latin teacher was Chesnutt's daughter Helen (1880–1969), and the two became lifelong friends. After traveling extensively abroad in the 1920s and again in the 1930s, Hughes settled in Harlem. He was best known for his poetry, first published in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis starting in 1921, but also wrote prose fiction and drama.
1. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began in February 1909, with a Committee on the Negro and "The Call," a statement protesting lawlessness against Black people. In 1910, the organization adopted its current name and in 1912 began publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1912 to 1944. Chesnutt's involvement with the NAACP extended over many years, and included serving on its General Committee, attending conferences, presiding at NAACP events in Cleveland, publishing four stories and two essays in The Crisis (1912, 1915, 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1931), and being awarded in 1928 the organization's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. [back]
2. Dear Lovely Death was a collection of twelve poems by Langston Hughes (Amenia, NY: Troutbeck Press, 1931), of which 100 copies were printed on a hand press in the fall of 1931 for private distribution by White artist, writer, and activist Amy Einstein Spingarn (1883–1980), who ran Troutbeck Press out of the Spingarns' home . [back]
3. The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations (New York: Golden Stair Press, 1931) was a collection of six poems by Langston Hughes in an inexpensive, magazine-style format with illustrations and page design by the White artist Prentiss Taylor (1907–1991), partly for distribution during Hughes's reading tour of the South. Hughes and Taylor operated Golden Stair Press on a shoestring budget from late 1931 to mid-1932. [back]
4. Chesnutt is referring to Hughes's extensive reading tour of the U.S. South from November 1931 to March of 1932 (during which time he would not have had a permanent address). The tour was partly financed by the Rosenwald Fund and led roughly West from Florida to Louisiana, ending with visits to several Midwestern states before Hughes returned to New York City on March 24, 1932. Chesnutt likely tracked Hughes's progress in Black periodicals, which often covered his appearances. See Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 223-234. [back]
5. Both books were popular fictionalized accounts of travels that take their narrators out of their usual environment. The Romany Rye (London: John Murray, 1857) by British novelist and travel writer George Henry Borrow (1803–1881) is an account combining fiction, travel writing, and amateur ethnography of his encounters with the nomadic Romani people of Europe. The Broad Highway: A Romance of Kent (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1910) was a world-wide bestseller by British romance writer Jeffery Farnol (1878–1952). Its narrator abandons a life of comfort in the city for a journey during which he encounters a diverse group of ordinary people, many of them in rural England. Langston Hughes did not write about his Southern tour during Chesnutt's lifetime, but did so later in the second chapter of his travel memoir, I Wonder As I Wander (New York: Rinehart and Co, 1956). [back]
