FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Lorraine Weston, Associate Director of Publicity (510.883.8291)
[email protected]
Letters from Langston
From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare
and Beyond
Langston Hughes
Edited by Evelyn Louise Crawford and
MaryLouise Patterson
Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley
“The collection is invaluable. It’s Hughes unguarded and off the record and it’s family life on the
Left, quietly committed and resilient.”
—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois
“Despite its snappy main title, this book is about much more than the celebrated Langston
Hughes. The letters published here, mainly from five lively, often embattled friends writing to
one another, document the profoundly human but politically courageous spirit of a small group
of loving people, all African American, who stood up, with varying degrees of radicalism and at
substantial personal risk to themselves, against racism, imperialism, and the excesses of
capitalism during the most dangerous decades of the twentieth century. With excellent footnotes
and other commentary, their book deserves our deepest respect and admiration.”
—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes and
coeditor of the Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
“Letters from Langston is the rare collection that sets high politics in conversation with everyday
life. Robin D. G. Kelley offers a lively foreword that contextualizes mid-century black radical
life as an expansive endeavor blending art and politics. Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise
Patterson look back on growing up in black Communist families in telling ways that illustrate the
possibilities and perils of radical lives. Usually funny, often wise, and always lovable, Langston
Hughes leaps off these pages and brings us into his world. A must-read for anyone interested in
the twentieth-century Left, the Harlem Renaissance, or how to live fully when life ain’t been no
crystal stair.”
—Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, coauthor of These United States:
A Nation in the Making, 1890–2015
“Letters from Langston is a great gift to those interested in African American literature and
intellectual and political history. Not only does it give us new insights into the continuing
radicalism of a major U.S. writer, Langston Hughes, but it also illuminates the careers and
contributions of four important black activists and intellectuals, Louise and William Patterson
and Matt and Evelyn Crawford. It provides a unique view into the trajectory of black political
and cultural radicalism from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Power and Black Art, providing a
personal window into the contradictions, continuities, and lived texture of those historical
moments.”
—James Smethurst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism:
From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance
Letters from Langston is a collection of unguarded and candid confidences—both personal and
political—between Langston Hughes, an American literary giant and leading figure in the
Harlem Renaissance, and four of his closest African American friends, Louise Thompson
Patterson, William L. Patterson, Matt N. Crawford, and Evelyn Graves Crawford. The four
exchanged letters with Hughes for nearly forty years; three were important leftist political figures
and active members of the Communist Party. Like Hughes, all were investigated and harassed by
the FBI, and one of them, William L. Patterson, was imprisoned for political reasons.
Letters from Langston begins in 1930 and ends shortly before Hughes’s death in 1967. In the
letters, the two couples share their lives of political activism and the everyday joys and sorrows
of family life with their friend Langston. He, for his part, savors their affection, companionship,
and support during his own struggles as an often-misunderstood “literary sharecropper.” This
distinctive volume of correspondence captures stories of friends and family living in an era of
uncertainty and sharing a vision of an idealized world—one without hunger, war, racism, and
class oppression.
Evelyn Louise Crawford, a retired arts administrator and consultant, and MaryLouise
Patterson, a pediatrician in clinical practice, are the daughters of Langston Hughes’s cherished
friends Evelyn Graves Crawford, Matt N. Crawford, Louise Thompson Patterson, and William
L. Patterson. Hughes was a frequent guest in the homes of the two families and was like an uncle
to both girls.
February 2016
World Rights
6 x 9, 424 pages, 30 b/w images
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520285330, $65.00, £44.95
Paperback ISBN: 9780520285347, $27.95, £19.95
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