The Big Sea

New York & London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. First edition. 335 pp. 8vo. Original green cloth. A few spots to boards, spine fading and slightly cocked. First edition. 335 pp. 8vo. Inscribed on the ffep: “For Noel, and Hollow Hills – happy island in The Big Sea – where this book was finished. Affectionately, Langston Hotel Grand, Chicago, July 26, 1940.”

In March 1932 Noël Sullivan, a wealthy aspiring concert singer and a patron to liberal and artistic causes, sent Hughes a note of his admiration with an invitation to visit him in San Fransisco. Sullivan, whose housekeeper Eulah Pharr had friends in common with Hughes, had recently performed (truncated) one of Hughes's poems in concert, set to music by John Alden Carpenter. Hughes stayed with Sullivan in May 1932 while on a lecture tour, and the two developed a very close friendship. "The man and all he stood for endeared him to Hughes, and for a quarter of a century he was the poet's most trusted confidant. [...] as close a friend as any relative Hughes ever had..." (Berry, Faith, Before & Beyond Harlem: A Biography of Langston Hughes, p. 149-150). This was a two-way street, as “Hughes’s immediate impact on Noël Sullivan was…dramatic” (Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, p. 239). Sullivan helped sustain Hughes with occasional financial gifts, he hosted him on most of his visits to California, often gave Hughes the use of his farm in Carmel, where Hughes wrote his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), which was dedicated to Sullivan.

By August 1939, Hughes was determined to “forge his autobiography into ‘a real titan’s book,’” and he settled at Noël Sullivan’s Hollow Hills Farm in Carmel to complete the autobiographical work he started in Chicago, in which he describes his time in Paris (Rampersad, Vol. I, p. 373). He returned again to Hollow Hills in December of 1939 to celebrate the Christmas holidays before heading back to the East Coast. While on the road, he missed the Carmel Valley, writing Sullivan, “’Your farm, Noel, is a little heaven” (p. 381-2). By late July 1940, Hughes headed again to Hollow Hills Farm, where he found construction beginning on a one-room cottage was building for Hughes's use. (Inventory #: 369371)