The Langston Hughes Collection, housed in the Kansas Collection at the Kenneth Spencer FireResearch Library, consists of approximately 300 items, many of them autographed, inscribed by Hughes to the KU Library. In 1957, Donald Dickinson, Senior Acquisitions Librarian at the University of Kansas, contacted Langston Hughes (who spent his early years in Lawrence, Kansas), asking if he would consider donating some of his poetry and prose to the University of Kansas. Dickinson and Director of Libraries Robert Vosper were interested in establishing a complete collection of the Kansas author's works for study and research.

Hughes responded enthusiastically, sending three items for the Library's collection, two of which are on display here, Dear Lovely Death, and Fire. Thus began a Dear Lovely Deathpersonal connection with the KU Library that resulted in hundreds of items donated by Hughes over for the Library collection. The Library acquisition file, housed in University Archives, documents the correspondence between Hughes and Library directors and staff.

The Collection is a legacy to students and faculty at the University of Kansas from Langston Hughes, a personal greeting from the artist to us, bridging time to connect with the present. This exhibition, drawn from Hughes' generosity seeks to connect the viewer with the wide range of his work, and the purpose of his voice, which was indeed for all people.

Langston Hughes at KU

In 1958, Robert Vosper, Director of Libraries, invited Langston Hughes to speak at KU. Hughes had also been invited to speak in Parsons to the Kansas Library Association in the Announcement to Langston Hughes lecturefall. He accepted both invitations, speaking at KU on October 7 and in Parsons on October 8. His arrival was enthusiastically awaited and he had a full schedule while here. In addition to a public presentation, he rehearsed with a jazz quartet that would accompany him in his program, met with several classes, attended a presentation by the a capella choir, lunched with friends and officials, and attended a book signing and reception at the Union. Hughes made two other presentations at KU, one in 1932 and the other in 1965.

Langston Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas

Langston Hughes spent his early boyhood in Lawrence, KS. In a presentation at the University of Kansas in 1965 he recalled: "The first place I remember is Lawrence, right here. And the specific street is Alabama Street. And then we moved north, we moved to New York Street shortly thereafter. The first church I remember is the A.M.E. Church on the corner of Ninth, I guess it is and New York. That is where I went to Sunday School, where I almost became converted, which I tell about in The Big Sea, my autobiography."

Hughes lived with his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, at 732 Alabama Street. The house does not exist today. His grandmother was the widow of one of the men killed with John Brown at Harpers Ferry Lewis Sheridan Leary), and later married Hughes' grandfather, an ardent abolitionist Charles Howard Langston.

Langston's years in Lawrence with his Grandmother were lonely, and frugal. In 1909 he entered the second grade at Pinckney School, having started school in Topeka, KS while living briefly with his mother. He was placed with other African American children in a separate room for his education. At various times between 1909 and 1915 Langston and his grandmother lived with friends, James W. and Mary Reed, at 731 New York Street. Hughes also attended New York School, and Central School, where he was reported to be a good student. Langston lived with the Reeds after his grandmother's death in March 1915, and left Lawrence to join his mother in Illinois later in the year.

"The ideas for my first novel had been in my head for a long time. 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. My grandmother never took in washing or worked in service or went much to church. She had lived in Oberlin and spoke perfect English, without a trace of dialect. She looked like an Indian. My mother was a newspaper woman and a stenographer then. My father lived in Mexico City. My granduncle had been a congressman. And there were heroic memories of John Brown's raid and the underground railroad in the family storehouse. But I thought maybe I had been a typical Negro boy. I grew up with the other Negro children of Lawrence, sons and daughters of family friends. I had an uncle of sorts who ran a barber shop in Kansas City. And later I had a stepfather who was a wanderer. We were poor – but different. For purposes of the novel, however, I created around myself what seemed to me a family more typical of Negro life in Kansas than my own had been. I gave myself aunts that I didn't have, modeled after other children's aunts whom I had known. But I put in a real cyclone that had blown my grandmother's front porch away."

The Big Sea, 1940

The Kansas Collection
Kenneth Spencer Research Library
University of Kansas
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