SOURCE: Ford, Karen Jackson. “Making Poetry Pay: The Commodification of Langston Hughes.” In Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, pp. 275-96. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ford examines the various ways in which Hughes acted as a “relentless marketer” of his work throughout a four-decade career.

In his first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes ironically titles a chapter “Poetry Is Practical,” in which he describes meeting his first literary friends and patrons through a sequence of events that owed more to serendipity than to practicality. In fact, the chronicle of those months in 1925 when Hughes was out of work and suffering from hunger is a tale of fortunate flukes and unanticipated generosity rather than one of pragmatics. Nevertheless, ten years later Arna Bontemps would assert, with a surprising lack of irony, what eventually...