Introduction: Editing the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

Near the beginning of The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes recalls the moment when he first became conscious of language as a formal expression of identity. Lonely in his grandmother’s house in Oklahoma, he discovers books: “then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”...