"I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them," Langston Hughes said in The Big Sea. "I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too." Hughes's insistence on writing about common African Americans--and doing so in the idioms, cadences and rhythms of black dialects--meant that he turned a deaf ear to the complaints of black contemporaries who insisted that African Americans be portrayed as educated, culturally polished individuals in literature authored by blacks, especially literature that would be read by white audiences.

Consequently, Hughes angered many of his black contemporaries, who perceived him as the toady of white culture and literature. White critics, while bemused by his novel style, dismissed his work as vacuous...