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    The Big Sea: An Autobiography
    The Big Sea: An Autobiography
    The Big Sea: An Autobiography
    Ebook388 pages6 hours

    The Big Sea: An Autobiography

    By Langston Hughes and Arnold Rampersad

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    About this ebook

    Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.

    Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

    Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 2, 2015
    ISBN9781466883499
    The Big Sea: An Autobiography
    Author

    Langston Hughes

    Langston Hughes (1902-67) was born in Joplin, Missouri, was educated at Lincoln University, and lived for most of his life in New York City. He is best known as a poet, but he also wrote novels, biography, history, plays, and children's books. Among his works are two volumes of memoirs, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, and two collections of Simple stories, The Best of Simple and The Return of Simple.

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    • 3/5
      This is basically a chronological list of the places Hughes went. There is little perspective on the times and really very little self analysis. The part of this book that I expected to be the most interesting to me was the last third about the Harlem Renaissance. However, even that was primarily name dropping.
    • 3/5
      It seems rather odd for a writer to end his autobiography with the declaration that he has decided to become a writer. Of course for a 28 year old to write his autobiography is also not a usual occurrence. Since very little about Langston Hughes could be described as usual, his story in no way seemed out of place. I came to Langston Hughes via William Styron and James Baldwin, and their interest and stories were enough for me to read on. I’m not much of a poetry man, as poetry does not usually contain the thread of plot that keeps my interest and understanding in tow, but I did enjoy those that were a part of his journey. To hear Hughes tell of his adventures, you would not know that he was a part of the “Negro” renaissance of the 1920’s that took place in Paris, and Harlem. I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.
    • 4/5
      A readable, unpretentious, quickly paced autobiography, with great scenes from the Harlem Renaissance.

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    The Big Sea - Langston Hughes

    I

    Twenty-One

    BEYOND SANDY HOOK

    Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.

    The books went down into the moving water in the dark off Sandy Hook. Then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man, inside and out. Twenty-one.

    I was twenty-one.

    Four bells sounded. As I stood there, whiffs of salt spray blew in my face. The afterdeck was deserted. The big hatches were covered with canvas. The booms were all tied up to the masts, and the winches silent. It was dark. The old freighter, smelling of crude oil and garbage, engines pounding, rolled through the pitch-black night. I looked down on deck and noticed that one of my books had fallen into the scupper. The last book. I picked it up and threw it far over the rail into the water below, that was too black to see. The wind caught the book and ruffled its pages quickly, then let it fall into the rolling darkness. I think it was a book by H. L. Mencken.

    You see, books had been happening to me. Now the books were cast off back there somewhere in the churn of spray and night behind the propeller. I was glad they were gone.

    I went up on the poop and looked over the railing toward New York. But New York was gone, too. There were no longer any lights to be seen. The wind smelt good. I was sleepy, so I went down a pair of narrow steps that ended just in front of our cabin—the mess boys’ cabin.

    Inside the hot cabin, George lay stark naked in a lower bunk, talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around. Above him in the upper bunk, two chocolate-colored Puerto Rican feet stuck out from one end of a snow-white sheet, and a dark Puerto Rican head from the other. It was clear that Ramon in the upper bunk didn’t understand more than every tenth word of George’s Kentucky vernacular, but he kept on laughing every time George laughed—and that was often.

    George was talking about women, of course. He said he didn’t care if his Harlem landlady pawned all his clothes, the old witch! When he got back from Africa, he would get some more. He might even pay her the month’s back rent he owed her, too. Maybe. Or else—and here he waved one of his appendages around—she could have what he had in his hand.

    Puerto Rico, who understood all the bad words in every language, laughed loudly. We all laughed. You couldn’t help it. George was so good-natured and comical you couldn’t keep from laughing with him—or at him. He always made everybody laugh—even when the food ran out on the return trip and everybody was hungry and

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