![]() His friend Carl Van Vechten, for example, received a flood of mail but usually answered each piece on the day it reached him. He admired people who answered letters promptly. With a crowded life that put him in touch over the decades with thousands of people, the mail was crucial to starting and keeping friendships and to doing business. “Who knows better than I,” Langston Hughes once wrote to a friend, “what letter writing entails?” Certainly he knew much about letters. Here’s the first paragraph of Rampersad’s introduction: As he put it, it’s not the writing, but the “getting down to writing” that’s the problem. ![]() Hughes and I both have a co mplicated relationship to the world of letters. ![]() The new Knopf volume is the first comprehensive selection of his correspondence, edited by Rampersad, winner of the National Humanities Medal (we’ve written about him here and here and here) and David Roessel, with Christa Fratantoro. ![]() ![]() I haven’t read much of the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, but I adore the man already, after reading Arnold Rampersad‘s engaging, straightforward introduction to him in the new Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. ![]()
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