HUGHES, Langston (1901-1967). Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.

8vo. Original green gilt-lettered cloth (spine sunned). Provenance: Noël Sullivan (bookplate); by descent to present owner. 

Third edition, published October 1929, and preceded by editions published February and May 1927. Despite poor reviews from Black critics, and “perhaps the poorest sales of any book Hughes would ever publish…Fine Clothes to the Jew was also his most brilliant book of poems, and one of the most astonishing books of verse ever published in the United States – comparable in the black world to Leaves of Grass in the white” (Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I, p.141).



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