SOURCE: "'Wondering About the Art of the Wanderer': Langston Hughes and His Critics," in The Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall, 1982, pp. 19-23.

In the following excerpt, Hodges explores the issue of consistency in Hughes's writing, and critical reaction to his work.

Me, I always been all tangled up in life—which ain't always as sanitary as we might like it to be …

                       The Sweet Flypaper of Life

One of the most prolific and versatile writers of the twentieth century, James Mercer Langston Hughes, produced, during his literary career of over forty-five years, a corpus as impressive in its range as in its sheer quantity. He experimented in all the major forms of literary art, from poetry to the novel and from autobiography to literary criticism. Perhaps it should not be at all surprising that such an enormous and multifarious body of literature would, in turn, generate a...