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