Not Without Laughter

In an “eye-opening portrait of the artist as a young black man in the Midwest,” the Harlem Renaissance poet made his fiction debut with this 1930 novel (A. Scott Berg, The New York Times Book Review).

A moving depiction of African American family life, Not Without Laughter is the coming-of-age story of Sandy Rogers as he navigates growing up in a racially divided small town in Kansas. With a mother who works as a housekeeper for a rich white family and a musician father who travels the country in search of work, Sandy’s family struggles against poverty and discrimination in a novel that “moves as swiftly as a jazz rhythm” (The New York Times), rendering an indelible portrait of the Black experience in America in the years leading up to World War I.

“Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th century American literature. . . . A powerful interpreter of the American experience.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer