The Big Sea

Big Sea is the first book in the autobiographical series of African-American poet Langston Hughes. Published in 1940, when Hughes was 38, the volume retraces his early childhood, adolescence, and initial years trying to succeed as a writer and artist of minority status in New York and Paris. With few opportunities to make money, Hughes learned to be highly resourceful, taking up odd jobs in nightclubs and taking small writing jobs to get by. As he evolved as a writer and thinker, Hughes worked through the psychological burden of past abuse inflicted by his father, torn between empathizing with his father’s own sources of trauma and the damage it did to him. Hughes also comments on the systemic racial injustice he sees around him in the United States. The autobiography is considered an important account of the various obstacles African-American creatives faced in the early twentieth-century United States.

Hughes begins with his memories of childhood. He grew up mainly with his mother, who raised him by herself after Hughes’ father abandoned the family to seek a fortune in Mexico. Hughes grew up in poverty; his mother had constant difficulty finding a well-paying job because she was black. Early on, the deeply empathetic Hughes saw the injustices of American society through his mother’s eyes. At times, when his mother could not fully support him, he lived with his grandmother and family friends. He developed an early interest in writing as a way of expressing his complex feelings of frustration, ambivalence, and hope, favoring poetry because of its great flexibility. His love of language drove him to excel in school and served as a refuge from his difficult life.

When Hughes was seventeen, his father took him to stay on his estate in Mexico. This experience was difficult for Hughes, who realized that his father had little interest in knowing him as a person. Hughes enrolled in college but dropped out soon after to work on various shipping vessels that sailed the Atlantic between America, Africa, and Europe. He struggled to find continuous employment because he was black. He moved to Europe, settling in Paris, where he survived by finding low-income housing. Paris brought him into contact with many artists from other uniquely difficult backgrounds. While in Paris, he developed a deeper interest in jazz and blues music, which had made its way across the Atlantic from Charleston. His poetry took on the unique textures and tones of jazz music, inspiring him to write poems that are now considered the first works of “jazz poetry.” Briefly, in Paris, Hughes believed that racism was on its way out of society. He published two books of poetry, but neither was a commercial success.



Upon returning home to the United States, Hughes was awarded a scholarship to study at Lincoln College. At Lincoln, he started to grow a close network of loving friends. He advocated for the employment of black faculty to teach the all-black student body, pointing out the glaring irony that all the faculty members were white. When Hughes was a senior, he wrote his first novel, Not Without Laughter. He was supported financially by an elderly white lady who ostensibly wanted to promote black perspectives in literature. However, after a while, Hughes realized that his benefactor was driven by inflexible preconceptions of blackness, and merely wanted to promote her own retrograde ideas of black experiences. When he challenged her, she threw him out of her house.

By this time, the financial boom of the twenties was winding down. Hughes committed to doing whatever it took to become a professional writer. He settled in Harlem; later, he would become one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes fondly recalls this period as one of the first moments of his life when he felt that he was part of the solidarity of black voices. The book closes in 1931, the year Hughes won the Harmon Award, one of the foremost prizes for American writers. Hughes describes winning this award as a turning point in his career as well as a message, to all black writers, that their willpower and perseverance can defeat even the most daunting obstacles American society puts before them. In this way, The Big Sea is both an exercise in individual self-awareness and an exposition of the collective creative potential of black people in the United States.