The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

First published:The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940; I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1919-1931

Locale: The United States, Mexico, Africa, and Europe

Principal Personages:

• Langston Hughes, an American poet
• W. E. B. Du Bois, a distinguished historian who served as a mentor to writers of the New Negro movement
• Jessie Fauset, a novelist, the literary editor of The Crisis
• Charles S. Johnson, a social scientist and editor of Opportunity
• James Weldon Johnson, a poet, novelist, and editor
• Vachel Lindsay, the white American poet who “discovered” Hughes
• Alain Locke, a literary critic and editor of The New Negro

Form and Content

Published in 1940, the first volume of Langston Hughes’s autobiography, The Big Sea, traces his life to 1931; the second volume, I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956), generally judged to be inferior to its predecessor, took up the saga of the poet’s life and adventures from 1931 to 1938. The Big Sea confines its scope to selected portions of Hughes’s childhood, his youth, and his development as a poet in the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement of the 1920’s. Hughes divided the text of his poetic autobiography into three books: “Twenty One,” “The Big Sea,” and “Black Renaissance.” Composed of pithy vignettes, each section focuses the reader’s attention on people and events which made a significant impression on the poet’s life in that period.

Appearing ten years after the end of the Harlem Renaissance, The Big Sea is Hughes’s collage of recollections. In book 1, Hughes details portions of his early life and the tension-laden relationship between himself and his parents—his mother and stepfather, and his biological father, who was by then a resident of Mexico, having fled the United States to escape the color bar. This segment also covers, somewhat summarily, Hughes’s arrival in New York, his brief passage through Columbia University, his first acquaintance with Harlem, and his determination “to get on a boat actually going somewhere.”

Book 2 chronicles Hughes’s life as a sailor and mess boy and his adventures in Africa, France, and Italy. This segment moves from a focus on Hughes to highlight the sailors he knew and the black musicians, entertainers, and performers he encountered in Paris during the early 1920’s.

Book 3 follows Hughes’s return to the United States. It cites his difficulties and success finding work, traces his development and “discovery” as a poet, shows his enrollment at Lincoln University to complete his college education, and concludes by focusing on the excitement generated by the Black Renaissance. Various Black Renaissance figures are introduced, and the atmosphere of the period and the movement are skillfully evoked. Hughes depicts his own activities in the 1920’s and shares his insights about the flavor of the times when, as he puts it, “the Negro was in vogue.” Here he describes how black artists and writers were attempting to capitalize on their newfound ability to capture the attention of white America.

Critical Context

As autobiography, Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea is most appreciated as a “biography of an era,” for its service as a record of the first sustained flowering of Afro-American literature, music, and art in the twentieth century. Despite this focus, readers will be able to take away some sense of the man and the influences which shaped his art during the first decade of a formidable literary career spanning four decades; they will note that while the poet remains modest, he in fact shows himself a diversified talent working within a variety of creative forms—poetry, drama, the essay, and the novel. Yet the strongest impression created in Hughes’s narrative is not so much of his own accomplishments, of his determination to make his living writing, or of even the wonder and excitement he exhibits as he makes his way through a world hostile to “colored” people and incredulous that a Negro should strive to make a living by becoming a writer. The narrative is most successful as a social-historical record, the documentation of a rich period in Afro-American arts and letters from the perspective of a participant. Thus, while The Big Sea allows readers insight into Langston Hughes’s creative imagination and recounts, however briefly, the more significant experiences that helped form his sensibility, it is the book’s firsthand account of the Harlem Renaissance that makes it an indispensable resource.

The Big Sea was well received when published and was widely discussed in various intellectual environments. As late as 1948, an Italian edition of the book was published with a cover illustration by Pablo Picasso. In a letter to Arna Bontemps, Hughes noted that his book had even been well received in South Africa.

Bibliography

Barksdale, Richard K. “Black Autobiography and the Comic Vision,” in Black American Literature Forum. XV (Spring, 1981), pp. 22-27.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America, 1974.

Miller, R. Baxter, ed. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide, 1978.

Nichols, Charles H, ed. Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes: Letters, 1925-1967, 1980.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America. Vol. 1, 1902-1941, 1986.