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Hughes at the public hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 26 March 1953
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Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, was a prolific writer of the black experience in the U.S. Known as “the poet laureate of Harlem,” he wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of fiction, twenty plays, three autobiographies, and dozens of magazine articles. De Santis was working on the second of two volumes he edited as part of the University of Missouri Press’s 16-volume The Collected Works of Langston Hughes when he received a phone call from Matthew J. Bruccoli, the renowned F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer and publisher of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Bruccoli asked De Santis to document the life and career of the African American poet.
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Draft of Hughes' poem "Good Morning" published in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
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De Santis’s book includes reviews of Hughes’s major texts, interviews, and a transcript of his testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. It further documents Hughes’s childhood, sociocultural milieu, friendships, and global influence with hundreds of illustrations and photographs of literary and political figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, Blanche and Alfred Knopf, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. “The Hughes Documentary Volume opens up new avenues for scholarly inquiry into the life and work of this important American writer,” said De Santis. “The book also contributes to the larger, ongoing project among African Americanists to recover, understand, and celebrate texts by black American writers that have been historically marginalized in the American literary canon.”
De Santis earned his Ph.D. in English with specializations in American and African-American literature at The University of Kansas. He earned an M.A. in Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in English at Lewis and Clark College. He has edited three other books on Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race and World Affairs, vol. 9, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil Rights, vol. 10, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; and Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture, 1942-62.
Portions of this press release produced by Marc Lebovitz, Coordinator of Public Information, Illinois State University Media Relations