By Jason Miller From Walter Magazine A disheveled manuscript titled The Bondwoman’s Narrative was listed only as “Lot 30: Unpublished Original Manuscript” when it appeared in a Swann Auction Galleries catalog in 2001. Written between 1853-1859, few people knew the hand-sewn pages pressed clumsily between two boards even existed. Barely meeting its retainer, the manuscript received only one bid. But The Bondwoman’s Narrative became a bestseller when it was published in 2002

By Matthew F. Delmont From Literary Hub Several years before the United States officially entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Black Americans were tracking the international spread of fascism closely. News relating to the Spanish Civil War, in particular, was especially captivating for them. In the pages of influential Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American , prominent Black journalists opined on the significance of

By Jason Miller From The Conversation A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the inspiration behind Lorraine Hansberry’s play “ A Raisin in the Sun ” and an uncompromising voice for social justice, Langston Hughes is heralded as one of America’s greatest poets. It wasn’t always this way. During his career, Hughes was routinely harassed by his own government. And the nation’s literati, balking at his subversive politics, tended to overlook his work. Read More...

By Jason Miller From Literary Hub Canceling a 60-day tour through Russia that he was slated to lead, Langston Hughes left to cover the Spanish Civil War on June 30th, 1937. The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him abroad to write “trench-coat prose” about black Americans volunteering in the International Brigades with articles being picked up by other news outlets such as Cleveland’s Call-post and Globe magazine. Hughes’s 22 articles covered an angle no one else in the

By John Hyland From Project Muse Thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings ... a tightly constructed study W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture opens with this observation: “Langston Hughes never lived in an America where the very real threat of lynching did not exist” (1). Despite this fact, an in-depth study of Hughes’s relationship to these gruesome events that marked his lifetime has not been undertaken until now. While of

From ResearchGate (originally published in an academic journal) An important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture is an important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. Most analysis of lynching and literary responses to it focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920, when the number of