Not Without Laughter.

HUGHES, Langston.

$12,500.00

Item Number: 129438

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.

First edition of Langston Hughes’ award-winning debut novel. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page in the year of publication to his editor, “For Bernard Smith ~ Sincerely, Langston Hughes July 3, 1930.” The recipient, American literary editor and critic Bernard Smith began working at Alfred A. Knopf in 1928 and eventually rose to editor-in-chief and managing editor. He notably edited the works of B. Traven, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Langston Hughes, including this, Hughes’ debut novel. In near fine condition. An exceptional association copy, inscribed by Hughes to the man that helped publish this very work. Exceedingly rare with only two inscribed copies of this work traced at auction.

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.