Poet, fiction writer, playwright, journalist, biographer, historian, anthologist, translator, and critic, Langston Hughes was one of the best known and most versatile black American writers of the twentieth century. While a poet first and foremost, from his professional beginnings as part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to his death in the late 1960s, Hughes experimented with varying degrees of success in almost every literary genre. His fictional character Jesse B. Semple (often referred to as Simple), which he originated in his Chicago Defender newspaper column in 1943, has been acclaimed as one of the most memorable fictional characters of modern times. A "race man" but never a racist, Hughes often reiterated his mission as an artist, which he first defined in 1926: to write about the black man in America with truth and honesty. Because Hughes did not waver from his mission, black writing in America has been...