If any author may be nominated as the literary heir of Langston Hughes, David Henderson deserves the honor. His poetry makes use of personal experience, popular culture, and European and American mythologies to create a new mythology for the people of Harlem and the castaways on Manhattan Island. Like all mythmakers, Henderson is at once a fabulist, sociologist, and historian. In a 1972 interview he describes himself as a "griot," assuming the mantle of the traditional African storyteller and chronicler.

Henderson was born in Harlem in 1942 and was raised there and in the Bronx. He later lived in the East Village on the edge of the Bowery, a section of New York populated by artists and derelicts alike. While in New York he attended The New School for Social Research, Bronx Community and Hunter Colleges of the City University. From 1964 to 1965 he also attended the East-West Institute in Cambridge...