Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryLangston Hughes begins this autobiography and travel memoir with an astonishing scene: In the spring of 1923, having recently taken a job as a mess boy on a freighter, the promising young poet gathers all the books he had acquired during a brief interval at Columbia University and unceremoniously heaves them into the waters off Sandy Hook, N.J.
” With a deceptive bluntness, owing something to the subdued lyricism of the blues, he goes on to recount his early experiences of withering poverty, parental estrangement and racial intolerance, as well as his efforts to evade these heartaches. “The Big Sea” tells of bookkeeping and English teaching near Mexico City, sailing from port to port along the west coast of Africa, and scraping by as a waiter in the nightclubs of Paris, among many peregrinations.