HUGHES, Langston, & Milton Meltzer.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. First edition, inscribed by Hughes on the front free endpaper, "especially for Marion - one of whose fine pictures adorns this book - with good wishes ever, Sincerely, Langston, New York Nov. 9 1956".The recipient was the social activist and photographer Marion Palfi, who fled to the US from Germany as a refugee during the Second World War. She befriended Hughes in Harlem shortly after her arrival, and he invited her to speak to his class at Atlanta University in 1947, where he was teaching his first semester as a visiting professor of creative writing. Palfi produced photo essays on a range of pressing social issues, including child abuse, prison inmate rights, and the injustices of poverty, segregation, and racism. Throughout the 1940s she took portraits of Harlem Renaissance writers; several of her photographs of Hughes are held among his papers at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Hughes said that "a Palfi photograph brings us face to face with hidden realities that its surface only causes us to begin to explore" (quoted by Berger). Her photographs also featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. Her contribution to this book, a portrait of Frances Wills, appears on page 295 and is credited on page 314.

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