HUGHES, Langston (1901-1967). Fields of Wonder. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

8vo. Original green cloth; publisher's pictorial dust jacket (a few short tears and creases, some toning). Provenance: Noël Sullivan (presentation inscription); by descent to present owner.

FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED IN THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION BY HUGHES TO SULLIVAN: “For Noel – on whose soil and about whose land many of these poems were written – Sincerely, Langston. Atlanta University, March 2, 1947.”

In February 1947, Hughes arrived in Atlanta, where he was to serve as Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Atlanta University. Fields of Wonder appeared “near the middle of the semester…. Black reviewers, who in general had never approved of either his blues or his radical verse, liked the ‘lyric’ style…. Critics who saw in Fields of Wonder evidence of a new maturity were wrong,” as the work included several poems from Hughes’s early years (Rampersad, Life. Vol. II, pp.139-131). Many of the poems are ”fragmentary tributes to nature….the ‘Great mountains’ at Big Sur, California and the commanding waves on the beach at Carmel’” where he first visited his friend Noël Sullivan in 1932 (ibid., p.131).


Fine African Americana from the Collections of Noël Sullivan & William P. and Alice D. Mahoney