Not Without Laughter

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: MARY CAROLYN WALDREP
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET BAINE KOPITO

Dedication

To

J. E. AND AMY SPINGARN

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2008, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. An introductory Note has been specially prepared for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967.

Not without laughter / Langston Hughes.

p. cm.

9780486113906

1. African American boys—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. 3. Kansas—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3515.U274N6 2007

813’.52—dc22

2007000743

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
45448702
www.doverpublications.com

Note

JAMES LANGSTON HUGHES was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, His parents separated shortly after his birth, and Hughes moved to Kansas to live with his grandmother. Early on, his literary talent was evident: he was elected “class poet” in eighth grade, as well as in high school, and his poems and short stories were included in the high school magazine (which he edited). His poem “The Weary Blues” was a first-prize contest winner (1925), leading to a book contract with Alfred Knopf. Hughes became acquainted with members of the Harlem Renaissance—the African-American literary movement of the early twentieth century, which turned attention to, and invoked pride in, the lives of black Americans—such as Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston. In 1930, Knopf brought out Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter. In the next few years, he published a poetry collection for young readers consisting of previously published works, The Dream Keeper (1932); a short story collection, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and a Broadway play, Mulatto (1935).

After winning a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1935, Langston Hughes devoted himself to writing plays, as well as trying his hand at journalism, reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Knopf published his autobiography, The Big Sea, in 1940 (a second volume, I Wonder As I Wander, published by Rinehart, came out in 1956). Montage of a Dream Deferred (Henry Holt, 1951) presented poems about life in Harlem; it was followed by a short story collection, Laughing to Keep from Crying (Henry Holt) in 1952. Hughes also published juvenile works, operas, gospel musical plays (one of which—Tambourines to Glory—appeared in novel form in 1958), poetry anthologies, and works on various topics, including jazz, African-American life, and civil rights. Following an exceedingly prolific career, and a peripatetic lifestyle, Langston Hughes died in New York City in 1967 after complications from surgery.

In Not Without Laughter, Hughes presents a portrait of black life in small-town Kansas in the early 1900s. The novel, which he wrote while a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, holds up a mirror to the writer’s own youthful experiences through the character of Sandy Rogers. First glimpsed as a small boy clutching the apron of his grandmother, “Aunt” Hager, during a deadly cyclone, Sandy is viewed by his mother, Annjee, as an “infinitely lovable edition” of his father, Jimboy. Jimboy, however, is regarded as a layabout, more interested in pursuing a life as a musician than in settling down with a “real” job to support his family.