The Best of Simple: Stories

Collected here in this book is some of the BEST OF SIMPLE (Semple). Simple was a character first introduced in the Chicago Defender and one who quickly won over a diverse group of readers. Here you will find his talking buddy at Paddy's Bar, varying female characters who function as both pleasure and the occasional headache for Simple, and a generous offeringing of black country folk wisdom on a variety of topics, a few still with us today as when Simple first offered them up for thought. The reader piggybacks Simple through all his trials of life as a black man in Harlem and the U.S. Throughout it all, there is this inescapable sense of lonliness and despair which in the end is buoyed up with laughter, perseverance, and an eternal hope for better times to come. James Baldwin said he could understand his father's rage and anger at whites, and, his mother's desire to build bridges of understanding and tolerance with whites through the character of Jesse B. Semple (Simple), Langston Hughes' most endearing character who is often called the black Aristotle. Baldwin's comment was perceptive because these two divergent views were embodied in Hughes himself and much of his body of work. (Hughes said that in the Simple stories it was often him having conversations with himself.) Hughes didn't hold a favorable view of whites in general as critics and others have already noted. He had too often been at the stinging end of injustice for being a proud African American while at the same time not being given the same treatment as less talented white writers within the same publishing house as himself. At the same time, unlike the rise of black militants he witnessed toward the last years of his life, he always understood that some whites where allies in a shared humanity and fight for justice with many blacks and should not be lumped into one large catagory as instigators of intolerance. Like Simple, Hughes wanted to keep hope alive for better times ahead. The poem I DREAM A WORLD is a good example.

I love this book. Simple reminds me of all the men I know where there is that thin line of love and hate but you just can't help but love them and their wit. For anyone who needs a few good laughs and enjoys Langston Hughes you won't be dissapointed because Mr. Hughes truly does it all!

Many people praise the poetry of Langston Hughes, but I believe that his prose is just as relevant in regards to social criticism, and as magnificent in form. Reading Simple's tall tales, and his anecdotes as he experienced Harlem reminded me of the stories my Grandparents told of how Chicago was during the great Northern Migration. This collection is a wonderful introduction to Jesse B. Simple

Langston Hughes demonstrates his versatility with this witty, enlightening collection of columns on Harlem's urban culture. Hughes' sharp criticism of American pretentions and hypocricies are tempered by Simple's down-home wisdom and the narrator's common sense criticism. What's left is an easy read that delights in presenting the soul and plight of black people in America in short, satiric episodes.