HUGHES, Langston (1901-1967). The Big Sea. New York & London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

8vo. Original green cloth (some minor soiling). Provenance: Noël Sullivan (presentation inscription); by descent to present owner.

FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY HUGHES TO SULLIVAN: “For Noel, and Hollow Hills – happy island in The Big Sea – where this book was finished. Affectionately, Langston Hotel Grand, Chicago, July 26, 1940.”

By August 1939, Langston Hughes was determined to “forge his autobiography [The Big Sea] into ‘a real titan’s book,’” and he settled at Noël Sullivan’s Hollow Hills Farm in Carmel Valley to complete the autobiographical work he started in Chicago in which he describes his experiences as a writer of color living in Paris (Rampersad, Life, Vol.I, p.373). He returned again to Hollow Hills in December of 1939 to celebrate the Christmas holidays before heading back to the East Coast. While on the road, he longed to be in Carmel Valley, writing Sullivan, “’Your farm, Noel, is a little heaven” (ibid., p.381-2). In May of 1940, he wrote Sullivan: “If Paris is taken I don’t know how to stand it…The barbarism of the whole thing is more than I can ascribe to human intelligence” (ibid., p.382).

By late July 1940, Hughes headed again to Hollow Hills in the Carmel Valley, where, to his “surprise and delight, he now had a mansion of his own in Noël Sullivan’s ‘little heaven’” (ibid., p.389). Construction began on a one-room cottage for Hughes on August 1, 1940, and one month later, Sullivan and a group of friends christened the cottage with champagne. 
Fine African Americana from the Collections of Noël Sullivan & William P. and Alice D. Mahoney