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Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War

Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War

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Editor: Anne Donlon
55 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding

This volume collects Langston Hughes’s correspondence with Nancy
Cunard and Louise Thompson during the Spanish Civil War. In addition,
the final section presents unpublished and uncollected poems by Hughes,
including “A Note from Spain,” an unpublished poem from the series of
epistolary “Johnny” poems, and “Mother and Child,” an undated poem by
Hughes that narrates an aerial bombing.

Author Biographies:

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967) was born in Joplin,
Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. After briefly
attending Columbia University, he worked on ships, traveled widely, and
lived in France, before returning to the U.S. In the 1920s, he gained a
reputation as a poet, becoming a leading figure in what he called, in
his first autobiography, “the black renaissance.” His first book of
poems,
The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. He graduated
from Lincoln University in 1929. In the 1930s, he became involved on the
political left, traveling to the Soviet Union, and later to Spain, and
serving as honorary president of the League of Struggle for Negro
Rights. Though he later distanced himself from his 1930s radical
politics, most famously in a public statement following controversy over
his poem “Goodbye Christ” in the early 1940s, and a McCarthy hearing in
1953, he remained involved in campaigns for social justice. In 1966, he
attended the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.
Throughout his life, he wrote plays, screenplays, short stories,
newspaper articles, speeches, autobiography, novels, and poems. He died
in New York.

NANCY CUNARD (1896-1965) was a British poet,
journalist, editor, and activist, who lived for much of her adult life
in France. Born into the Cunard shipping line family, she was
disinherited when she publicly denounced her mother’s racism in
Black Man and White Ladyship
(1931). She was involved in European modernism and surrealism in Paris
and London in the late 1910s and 1920s. After she met the
African-American musician Henry Crowder, she became committed to African
diasporic culture and emancipatory politics. Her anthology
Negro (1934)
compiled a wide range of writing on art and politics of Africa, the
Caribbean, and the Americas. She wrote for newspapers including Sylvia
Pankhurst’s
New Times and Ethiopia News, the Associated Negro
Press, and the Manchester Guardian on events in Ethiopia, Spain, France,
England, and the Caribbean. She wrote poetry, including a collection of
poems in French on Spain,
Nous Gens d’Espagne [We People of Spain], memoirs, pamphlets, and articles. She died in Paris.

LOUISE THOMPSON PATTERSON (1909-1999) was born in
Chicago, and grew up in California. She graduated cum laude from the
University of California at Berkeley in 1923. She took part in literary
and artistic circles in Harlem in the 1920s, and in 1931 organized a
trip of African-Americans to the Soviet Union to take part in the
unrealized film
Black and White. In the 1930s, she became a
prominent figure in the American left, working for the International
Workers’ Order and serving on the editorial board of the left-wing
Woman Today.
Under the I.W.O.’s auspices, she founded the Harlem Suitcase Theatre
with Hughes in 1938. She married the organizer William Patterson in
1940. She helped found the Civil Rights Congress, and formed the black
women’s organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice. She died in New
York.

Selected Archives: