Cold and materialistic, his father disliked not only poetry but other black Americans, who seemed to him passive and unreliable. Yet both are related with such a constant appeal to humor that they epitomize the spirit of the book, which appears to reflect the same triumph of laughter and art over adverse circumstances that marks the African American art form most admired by Hughes: the blues.Ĭentral to the structure of the book is Hughes's depiction of his father. The first had to do with his intimate search for literary and racial identity the second transformed him into a radical. It ends with the collapse of his relationship with the wealthy patron who had pampered then dumped him under baffling, hurtful circumstances in 1930. The book opens with Hughes's decision in 1923, as he set sail as a messboy on a freighter to Africa, to throw overboard all of the many books he had brought on board. and, at great length, his experiences, good and bad, as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Fundamentally episodic, The Big Sea is a succession of brief chapters, written in deceptively simple prose, that recount various adventures through which Hughes had passed during his formative years in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio his extended stays with his father in Mexico his unhappy year at Columbia University his discovery of Harlem and his visit to Africa and Europe a year among the black bourgeoisie in Washington, D.C. Langston Hughes's first volume of autobiography (1940) covers the years of his life from his birth in 1902 to the spring of 1931.
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