The Big Sea

With an introduction by Hughes’ award-winning biographer, this memoir is “excellent reading . . . remarkable as a self portrait and a record” ( New York Times ). Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade—Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet—a