"A DEFINITIVE ANTHOLOGY": POETRY OF THE NEGRO, 1949 FIRST EDITION, CO-EDITED BY LANGSTON HUGHES
HUGHES, Langston and BONTEMPS, Arna, editors. The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949. An Anthology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949. Octavo, original gray-green cloth, original dust jacket.
First edition of this "definitive anthology" of African American and Caribbean poetry, co-edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, in original dust jacket.
Poetry of the Negro, which spans the 18th-century to the mid-20th-century, won quick praise on publication as "a stimulating cross-section of the imaginative writing" of leading African American and Caribbean poets (New York Times). In addition to 14 poems Hughes and 11 by Bontemps, this anthology features work by Phillis Wheatley, Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Margaret Walker, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray and many others. Included is a section of "Tributary Poems by Non-Negroes" such as Whitman, Melville, Wordsworth and Longfellow, and a selection of poems by Caribbean poets. First edition, first printing: with printed "First Edition" on the copyright page. Bruccoli & Clark, 171. Blockson 7491.
Book about-fine, dust jacket with some mild edge-wear including two small chips to spine head, very good.