**This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” — *Amiri Baraka* ** In his incisive introduction to *The Big Sea* , an American classic, Arnold Rampersad writes: This is American writing at its bestsimpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer…Mark Twain. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In *The Big Sea* he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decadeHarlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poetat the center of the Harlem Renaissance.