The Panther & the Lash

Hughes's last collection of poems commemorates the experience of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear—the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time.

“Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America's acknowledged poet of color. Here, Hughes's voice—sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful—is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as "Prime," "Motto," "Dream Deferred," "Frederick Douglass: 1817-1895," "Still Here," "Birmingham Sunday." " History," "Slave," "Warning," and "Daybreak in Alabama."“Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature . . . a powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia InquirerLANGSTON HUGHES (1901–1967), one of the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Joplin, Missouri, and spent much of his childhood in Kansas before moving to Harlem. Among his numerous awards and honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant in 1947.