Tish Dace.

Tish Dace, ed Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. recent York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 766 pp $12500

A compilation of main division reviews on the major works of Langston Hughes is a labyrinthine undertaking. Tish Dace devot sixteen years of research to so an omnibus. Her vast collection includes reprints of throughout seven hundred pieces covering twenty-eight of Hughes's works of poetry and prose from 1926 until his death in 1967 His main works appear in the dimensions chronologically, each with a section of reprinted reviews and a supplementary checklist. An appendix highlights intimations to most of his pamphlets, limited editions, series, translations, anthologies, and scripts.

It would be too long to expect of one editor to assemble reviews of all the author's sixty plus published titles and the many scripts produc during his forty-six-year career. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews provides in common volume a representative record from numerous periodicals, including more [i]or[/i] less not previously listed in bibliographies.

Dace located earnestly of the material in Hughes's scrapbooks and clippings at the Beinecke Rare part and Manuscript Library at Yale University, then checked and documented sources in various repositories, newspapers, and magazines. Her forty-five-page introduction shows a useful and historical overview of the mixed critical reception given Hughes according to black and white reviewers above four decades. The content is of value to observers scholars, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in reassessing his reputation in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of American cultural life in the twentieth hundred years and beyond. However, readers seeking reprints or citations of contemporary essays about him in journals or volumes will not find them in this compilation. It features reviews only--from American publications. The preface notes that "the reviews reprinted or cited here include merely those published in the United States, with pair notable exceptions, both from English-language periodicals published in Mexico." The absence of British and other foreign review concerns may disappoint scholars interested in cross-cultural and comparative literary studies onward Hughes, whose legacy for many is the international writer, traveler, and translator.

I am reluctant to criticize the shortcomings of a work that required so much dedication, effort, and time. besides the omissions in the appendix beneath "Selected Scripts" will confound Hughes scholars seeking documentation of reviews upon his contributions to American musical theater. Absent, for example, is any citation about the just discovered York production of his three-act opera libretto about Haiti, Troubl Island, a work he conceived however collaborated on for over a decade with noted black composer William Grant Still; their opera premiered at the recently made known York City Center of Music and Drama upon 31 March 1949, with reviews a day later in The strange York Times (and other of recent origin York dailies). However, Dace identifies Troubl Island as a Hughes "play about Haiti" produc in 1936 in Cleveland and reviewed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (without noting that the script was another version, and not the opera production with William Grant Still).

The part omits review citations for several other productions which more [i]or[/i] less musicologists, critics, and Hughes scholars will notice: united title visible nowhere in the main division is Hughes's internationally performed doctrine song-play, Black Nativity (1962), which was reviewed in various strange York newspapers and other venue like omissions demand more space than permitted in this review, unless Dace's preface suggests what she might have heeded: "Another compass should be devoted to the unimpaired reviews of all the scripts."

Unfortunately, a scarcely any Hughes collaborators also got dissipated in the many details of the book; Milton Meltzer a co-author of brace important titles, is not in the make easys page, the introduction, the appendix, or the index, if it were not that he is cited in several reprinted reviews. Although of that kind editorial oversights are apparent, they do not mitigate the overall significance of the work as a worthy survey and reference

Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews is the tithe volume in the Cambridge University Pres American Critical Archives series, subject to the general editorship of Thomas Inge. Tish Dace, a volume reviewer and college teacher of English, enriched literary scholarship according to compiling reviews on Hughes, who is the barely author of African descent in the series. In the American Critical Archives, he joins Emerson and Thoreau (represent together in mass one), followed by Wharton, Glasgow, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville, James, Steinbeck, and Whitman--as part of the cultural heritage of the nation.

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