Gumby's People > Langston Hughes
![Langston Hughes, p. [56]](https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/files/original/httpwwwcolumbiaeducgi-binculdevdlo2obj=rbml_gumby_0041_058_001_001_dcd95ed7dd.jpg)
![Langston Hughes, p. [57]](https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/files/original/httpwwwcolumbiaeducgi-binculdevdlo2obj=rbml_gumby_0041_059_001_001_c140a12940.jpg "Langston Hughes, p. [57]")
As one of the premier literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond (over his long career he published poems, short stories, novels, plays, and non-fiction essays, among other works), it was inevitable that Gumby would devote at least one volume of his scrapbook to Langston Hughes. It couldn't hurt that Hughes was also one of the artists that Gumby "collected," with Hughes at least occasionally visiting the Gumby Book Studio. (Gumby tried to enlist Hughes to serve as the master of ceremonies at the Studio's fifth anniversary celebration in 1930, though he declined on account of a previously-scheduled trip away from New York.)
As the above page ("Langston Hughes," p. [56]) indicates, much of Gumby's scrapbook about Hughes was devoted to collecting the writer's work. Gumby clipped "Simple and Me" (an essay about one of Hughes' most famous characters, Jesse B. Semple) and the poems "Passing" and "Shame on You" from Phylon, a scholarly and literary journal founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and published by Atlanta University as a showcase for African-American intellectual achievement. On the page opposite these and two other clippings, Gumby mounted a more personal memento: a photograph that Hughes inscribed "Sincerely is so commonplace--Langston."