I Wonder as I Wander

The most dramatic and intimate moments of Langston Hughes’s life in the turbulent 1930s. The second volume of his autobiography following The Big Sea.

Langston Hughes picks up where he left off in The Big Sea, which focused on his early life and involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. In this sequel, his wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

“The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander are among the wisest, warmest and most informative books to issue from Langston’s pen, and by that to say from the Renaissance or any other literary movement.” —Amiri Baraka, former poet laureate of New Jersey and author of Black Music

“An immensely interesting book.” —The New Yorker