Langston Hughes: Coming of Age In America

Most know Langston Hughes as a poet, but those of you who have not read his prose are missing something. My North-Carolina-born-and-raised mother would easily recognize the world of Langston Hughes's first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930. Yet his fictional setting is based on Lawrence, Kansas, just prior to World War I, and hers was Piedmont North Carolina just after it.


The similarities in black-white relationships are also remarkable, the only exception being Kansas's integrated schools. Not only that, but many of Hughes's believable and well-developed characters, with all their strengths and weaknesses, even seem to share characteristics with whites straight out of Faulkner's novels of the same time period.

The protagonist's aunt runs away with a traveling carnival and follows the same trajectory as Caddy in The Sound and the Fury. Another aunt is so desirous of social status that she becomes an Episcopalian and refuses to eat watermelon; think Snopes.

Are these similarities because it IS the same time period, even if Faulkner writes of northern Mississippi? Or because Hughes wished to reach a white audience as well as a black one with this first novel? Or maybe both of them are writing stories that are identified as black or white but simply mirror the human condition of the time.

I'd like to believe the latter.


Strangely enough, Hughes's characters also mirror the human condition of the 21st century. But then a good novel never loses its relevance.