The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 2, 1941–1967, I Dream a World.

I love both volumes I and II. It took a while to read both, and thought I knew he had died, as the book began to detail his last few months, I began to really get sad, and as he died, I literally was in tears. I'm not a crier, and I read this book while on the stationary bike at the gym. As he was dying I was feeling as if I was losing a friend. I must have really gotten emotionally invested in the book because I suddenly had to leave the gym and go home. It was as if some one called me on my cell to tell me someone I cared about had died. This was a great book.

Alice Walker writes: "One of the best, most sensitively written, well-researched, thoughtful, and interesting (indeed, fascinating) biographies I have ever read. It is of enormous psychic and emotional importance to me, as someone who met, and was helped on my way by, Langston Hughes, in the year before his death. . . . This book - with all its pain and sadness -- is a gift."