Not Without Laughter.

HUGHES, Langston.

Item Number: 124348

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.

First edition of Langston Hughes’ first novel. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in the scarce original dust jacket which is in very good condition with some chips to the spine. With a full page from the New York Times Book Review issued August 3, 1930 laid in which features a two-column review of the novel and has left some toning to pp. 152-153. Only a handful of dust jackets are known, with only one appearing at auction in 90 years.

By the late 1920s, Hughes' work had been, for over a decade, enormously influential on the literature and politics that shaped the Harlem Renaissance. At a time before widespread arts grants, Hughes had gained the financial support of several private patrons and took two years to develop and publish his first novel, Not Without Laughter. In line with his previous work which sought to depict the "low life", that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata, the semi-autobiographical novel follows the story of a black boy named Sandy growing up in a small Kansas town in the 1930s. Sandy's mother works as a housekeeper for a wealthy white family, while his father is constantly traversing the country in search of work. Hughes said that a good portion of the novel's characters and settings were based on his memories of growing up in Lawrence, Kansas: "I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West, about people like those I had known in Kansas. But mine was not a typical Negro family." Not Without Laughter won the Harmon Gold Medal in literature in 1930.