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Exhibitions List

Broadside Press Broadside Series. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1965-1969.

Dudley Randall (1914-2000) created the Broadside Press in 1965 to publish his own poetry, but soon expanded to include other poets with focus on producing inexpensive but quality broadsides and books. The press was run out of Randall's home, with limited funds, but was able to publish the most important African-American poetry of the time. Profits from the sales were put back into the company as Randall supported himself as a librarian at the University of Detroit. This series includes poems by Hughes as well as by Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Toomer, and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka).

Waring Cuney, 1906-
Lincoln University Poets: Centennial Anthology, edited by Waring Cuney, Langston Hughes, and Bruce McM. Wright; foreword by Horace Mann Bond; introduction by J. Saunders Redding. New York: Fine Editions Press, 1954.

Poets Cuney and Hughes were students together at Lincoln University, in nearby Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and both were part of the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement. Wilmington native and author J. Saunders Redding wrote the introduction.

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Jim Crow's Last Stand. New York: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943. Hughes' desire to disseminate his poetry to a broader African-American audience, led to the publication of small inexpensive editions of his work. This pamphlet of twenty-three poems was sold for a quarter at his poetry readings in the South.

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Shakespeare in Harlem; with drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer. New York: Knopf, 1942. E. McKnight Kauffer (1890-1959) was an American artist who made his reputation in England designing posters in the twenties and thirties. He painted over 100 posters for the London Underground and for Shell Oil. Kauffer was a prolific book illustrator as well. In 1937, the Museum of Modern Art held a one-man show of his work.

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967.
The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Hughes' first book, The Weary Blues, celebrates the everyday lives of working-class African-Americans in a vernacular voice influenced by such American poets as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but is also strongly tied to jazz and blues and the oratory of the church.

Gift of the University of Delaware Library Associates