Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem

Best, a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton, highlights an often overlooked aspect of Langston Hughes, the Bard of Harlem: his views on religion. The book explores the religious nuances in Hughes’s prolific literary career, which spanned decades and genres and had both explicit and implicit religious content. In doing so, Best explains where the notion that Hughes was an atheist began (particularly in the work of Walter E. Hawkins) and then contends that, though Hughes fervently avoided joining a particular congregation, he was a “thinker about religion” if not a “religious thinker.” Best weaves together the varied and often controversial strands of Hughes’s life—an unsuccessful religious conversion, progressive politics, and an intriguing but doomed trip to Russia to create a film—in order to paint a more complete picture of a nonconformist and his modern relationship with religion. With a functional but sometimes plodding style, Best provides ample context for a more intricate interpretation of Hughes’ stance on God using examples and referencing the work of other scholars to slowly build his arguments from the ground up. This is a well-researched argument that offers a vivid perspective on a literary giant for scholars to consider. (Nov.)