Langston Hughes, life-long friend and fan of Carl Van Vechten, captured the inner black world to which his well-off friend desired entry. Born in 1902 into rural poverty, the internationally renowned Hughes counted in his large œuvre short stories, novels, plays, operas, two memoirs, and children’s books, as well as edited and translated volumes. Hughes may be the one New Negro author who honestly could list his occupation as “writer.” He began his ascent to fame when Jessie Fauset published the nineteen-year-old poet’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the June 1921 Crisis. Before the decade ended, Hughes brought out two much-reviewed collections of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Rich in vernacular speech, humor, and musical influence, Hughes’s poems reveal his empathy with the average man and woman and his love for, and pride in, African American culture. Lines like “Night coming tenderly/Black like me” have fairly earned Hughes his reputation as the bard of black America. The swinging meter evident in much of his verse – “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,/Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,/I heard a Negro play...” – trumpets his fusion of black literature and music, drawing on both the rhythms and the images of blues and jazz to create a singularly American poetry. Innovative in form in ways that much other work of the period could not approach, Hughes’s poetic amalgam of black music and vernacular earns him a high place in the pantheon of American poets.