Selected letters of Langston Hughes / edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel ; with Christa Fratantoro.

"This unprecedented collection of Langston Hughes's letters is arranged by decades, with helpful interstitial material and notes throughout to guide us through Hughes's journey in all its aspects: literary, personal, political, practical. His correspondents include such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright. The letters tell the story of a writer finding his voice; struggling with how to support himself in a literary career; reaching out to students in segregated schools in the South; using his artistic clout in the service of the disenfranchised or wrongly accused; and discovering, above all, that as an African American writer in a segregated America, his only true freedom..."-- From publisher description.