Reviews: (by author)

Rhynes, Martha E. I, Too, Sing America The Story of Langston Hughes. North Carolina: Morgan Reynolds Publishers, Inc., 2002. ISBN 1-883846-89-7. 144pp.

I, Too, Sing America The Story of Langston Hughes is a well-detailed account of Langston Hughes’ life. The story begins with his childhood and exposure to segregation that played a major part in his controversial writings later on in life. The biography continues through his life and concludes at his death. While reading this book one feels as though they are traveling with Hughes through his experiences in and outside of the United States. The reader learns that Hughes was a world traveler and fluent in Spanish. The reader gets insight into what drove Hughes to write work that during his life was considered controversial and anti-American. Hughes’ feelings about social issues, expressed through his prose, led to his having to explain himself to Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Committee in 1953.

Martha E. Rhynes did an extremely fine job of not just telling the reader what happened during Hughes’ life but also describing his feelings about other writers and, later, when his prose was deemed no longer an appropriate description of the Black community, his feelings about critics. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Hughes’ life and especially to students doing a paper on him. This book provides quite a lot of information about Hughes’ life; it also lists Hughes’ major works and includes a bibliography of other works related to his life.

Reviewed by Tracy L. Frie

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