Homemade Christmas postcard

"The cards provide a window on the state of the author’s career and challenges in 1950. According to Arnold Rampersad in his two-volume biography, 'The Life of Langston Hughes' (Oxford University Press, 1988), 'The last weeks of 1950 found him nevertheless in a melancholy mood, his spirits sinking lower again as he again became a target of red-baiting.' Hughes was living at 20 East 127th St., in the home of Toy and Emerson Harper, who were as an adoptive family to him from the 1920s onward. As Rampersad notes, Hughes’ career was at a difficult moment, with the opera he wrote the libretto for, 'The Barrier,' a commercial and critical failure, and his book ‘Simple Speaks His Mind’ not the bestseller he hoped (although critics appreciated it). Hughes was working on a book and another opera, but both projects had begun to bore him, and he was low on cash. Hughes was not, however, low on good wishes for his friends."—Michael Morand, https://news.yale.edu/2017/12/08/christmas-lift-holiday-lines-langston-hughes-view-beinecke