Not Without Laughter: A Novel

Rediscover the great Harlem Renaissance poet’s first and only novel—an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale about an African American family set in the Midwest at the dawn of World War I Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter is drawn in part from the author’s own recollections of youth and early manhood. “I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West,” he later explained of his award-winning debut, and it is as a fond and richly anecdotal family and community portr