The Ways of White Folks

The Ways of White Folks is a collection of short stories by Langston Hughes, published in 1934. Hughes wrote the book during a year he spent living in Carmel, California. The collection, "marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism or, contextually: humorous racism," is among his best known works. Like Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) and Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938), it is an example of a short story cycle.

The collection consists of 14 short stories:

In September 1996, upon the publication of a comprehensive edition of Hughes's short stories entitled The Short Stories of Langston Hughes (ISBN 0-8090-1603-6), David Herbert Donald, in a review published by The New York Times, wrote:

Hughes's short stories might occupy a larger place in American literature had they all lived up to the standard he set in The Ways of White Folks, written when he was under the immediate influence of D. H. Lawrence and when he was still a passionate socialist. He could not sustain the tone of those powerful, polemical pieces. Temperamentally averse to confrontation, in subsequent years he allowed his tone to slip from irony to sarcasm, and his later short stories — some of which ran to only two or three pages — were often scenes or vignettes, without much room for characterization or development.