Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews.

Tish Dace, ed. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 766 pp. $125.00.

A compilation of book reviews on the major works of Langston Hughes is a labyrinthine undertaking. Tish Dace devoted sixteen years of research to such an omnibus. Her vast collection includes reprints of over seven hundred pieces covering twenty-eight of Hughes's books of poetry and prose from 1926 until his death in 1967. His main works appear in the volume chronologically, each with a section of reprinted reviews and a supplementary checklist. An appendix highlights references to most of his pamphlets, limited editions, series, translations, anthologies, and scripts.

It would be too much to expect of one editor to collect reviews of all the author's sixty plus published titles and the many scripts produced during his forty-six-year career. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews provides in one volume a representative record from numerous periodicals, including some not previously listed in bibliographies.

Dace located much of the material in Hughes's scrapbooks and clippings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, then checked and documented sources in various repositories, newspapers, and magazines. Her forty-five-page introduction offers a useful and historical overview of the mixed critical reception given Hughes by black and white reviewers over four decades. The content is of value to students, scholars, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in reassessing his reputation in the context of American cultural life in the twentieth century and beyond. However, readers seeking reprints or citations of contemporary essays about him in journals or books will not find them in this compilation. It features reviews only--from American publications. The preface notes that "the reviews reprinted or cited here include only those published in the United States, with two notable exceptions, both from English-language periodicals published in Mexico." The absence of British and other foreign review references may disappoint scholars interested in cross-cultural and comparative literary studies on Hughes, whose legacy for many is the international writer, traveler, and translator.

I am reluctant to criticize the shortcomings of a book that required so much dedication, effort, and time. Yet the omissions in the appendix under "Selected Scripts" will confound Hughes scholars seeking documentation of reviews on his contributions to American musical theater. Absent, for example, is any citation about the New York production of his three-act opera libretto about Haiti, Troubled Island, a work he conceived but collaborated on for over a decade with noted black composer William Grant Still; their opera premiered at the New York City Center of Music and Drama on 31 March 1949, with reviews a day later in The New York Times (and other New York dailies). However, Dace identifies Troubled Island as a Hughes "play about Haiti" produced in 1936 in Cleveland and reviewed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (without noting that the script was another version, and not the opera production with William Grant Still).

The book omits review citations for several other productions which some musicologists, critics, and Hughes scholars will notice: One title visible nowhere in the book is Hughes's internationally performed gospel song-play, Black Nativity (1962), which was reviewed in various New York newspapers and other venues. Such omissions demand more space than permitted in this review, but Dace's preface suggests what she might have heeded: "Another volume should be devoted to the complete reviews of all the scripts."

Unfortunately, a few Hughes collaborators also got lost in the many details of the book; Milton Meltzer, a co-author of two important titles, is not in the contents page, the introduction, the appendix, or the index, but he is cited in several reprinted reviews. Although such editorial oversights are apparent, they do not mitigate the overall significance of the book as a worthy survey and reference.

Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews is the tenth volume in the Cambridge University Press American Critical Archives series, under the general editorship of Thomas Inge. Tish Dace, a book reviewer and college teacher of English, enriched literary scholarship by compiling reviews on Hughes, who is the only author of African descent in the series. In the American Critical Archives, he joins Emerson and Thoreau (represented together in volume one), followed by Wharton, Glasgow, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville, James, Steinbeck, and Whitman--as part of the cultural heritage of the nation.