Abstract
ABSTRACT In Langston Hughes's autobiographies The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), he critiques the American mythos of individual, financial uplift in a meritocratic nation. Instead of illustrating the achievability of rising from poverty to riches, Hughes highlights the near-impossibility of such a rise for black Americans and challenges a conflation between money and virtue. His autobiographies voice the role of luck in wealth-building and describe an American son who values freedom and community over capital. In so doing, Hughes distinguishes his self-formation from forefathers of American autobiography, from his most important patron, and from his own father. Examining Hughes's focus on fortune in The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander reveals a greater challenge to white supremacist and capitalist values than critics of these books have previously acknowledged, and the narrative structures of the autobiographies enact an alternative, horizontal model as a challenge to the idealized American trajectory of a vertical rise.
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