Simple, or Jesse B. Semple, first appeared in print on 13 February 1943 in the black-owned Chicago Defender. Langston Hughes first intended Simple as a device to popularize the war effort among blacks, many of whom resented the disparity between racial injustice at home and the alleged democratic goals of the war, but Simple acquired a life beyond propaganda.
The classic setting for a Simple episode is a Harlem bar, with a conversation between the fun-loving, irreverent, but racially committed Simple, on the one hand, and the educated, poised, but dull narrator, on the other. However, Simple's world also includes memorable characters such as his girlfriend, Joyce, later his wife; a less respectable friend, Zarita; and his landlady, who calls him “Third Floor Rear.”
Hughes claimed that Simple was based on a man he knew casually in Harlem, but both Simple and the narrator in reality are Hughes himself, who once pronounced Simple “really very simple. It is just myself talking to me. Or else me talking to myself” (“Simple and Me,” Phylon, Oct.–Dec. 1945). The two voices form a sort of colloquium on Hughes's tensions of beliefs, as well as on his deeper fears and desires. The narrator may be seen as Hughes without love, laughter, and poetry, the man he might have been without his writing in service to black America. Simple himself epitomizes the saving graces of black America, the gift of self-redemption in the face of historic adversity.
Over twenty years, Simple became one of Hughes's most successful artistic creations, admired and beloved by readers who followed his exploits in syndicated columns that eventually included the white New York Post. Edited, the columns led to five volumes in Hughes's lifetime: Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), and Simple's Uncle Sam (1965).A sixth volume, The Return of Simple, appeared in 1994, edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper. Simple is easily the most enduring and endearing creation of a comic character in African American journalism and literature.
—Arnold Rampersad
