Langston Hughes was a leading poet in the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer in the form of jazz poetry. While working as a hotel busboy in Washington, D.C. in the early 1920s, he was "discovered" by fellow poet Vachel Lindsay, who helped publicize his work. In 1926 he published his first poetry collection, *The Weary Blues*, which opens with one of his best-known poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Themes he explores in his poetry include the lives of the Black working class, jazz and blues music, and race consciousness.
This Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of the publicly accessible poems by Langston Hughes known to be in the U.S. public domain, which is limited to about the first decade of his work.
Readers who love jazz-inflected verse and the voice of the Harlem Renaissance will treasure this collection of Langston Hughes's earliest published poems.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)