HUGHES, Langston (1901-1967). Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.

8vo. Illustrations after E. McKnight Kauffer. Original orange and black cloth; pictorial dust jacket (a few short tears, spine toned). Provenance: Noël Sullivan (presentation inscription); by descent to present owner.

FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED PRIOR TO PUBLICATION BY HUGHES TO SULLIVAN: “Dear Noël – Much of this book, you know, was written at Hollow Hills. But the poems are of much less pleasant places. Happiness to you always! Langston. New York, February 6, 1942.”

In writing Shakespeare in Harlem, his book of poems about the blues published on February 16, 1942, Hughes “returned to the inspiration for his greatest creative period, which had culminated in in 1927 in Fine Clothes to the Jew” (Rampersad, Life, Vol. II, p.40). “Shakespeare in Harlem was emphatically, unashamedly about being black. Like Fine Clothes to the Jew, it was also an interior portrait, almost completely free of overt protest in self-pity, and resounding in its success as a representation of the lives and thoughts of the mass of black Americans” (ibid., p.42). Much of the work was written in 1941 while Hughes stayed at Noël Sullivan’s Hollow Hills. “To aid Langston Hughes, and have him living at Hollow Hills, was both a spiritual and psychological book to Sullivan” (ibid., p.7). The benefit was mutual; one of Hughes’s friends, actress Elsie Arden, wrote him during this period: “I love to know you are near Noël…your serenity of spirit and manner, your gentle voice and your inviolable affection for him are of real support in his heavy and often difficult hours” (ibid., p.7).


Fine African Americana from the Collections of Noël Sullivan & William P. and Alice D. Mahoney