All of that began for a young boy in Lawrence, Kansas, who discovered the world was large enough for him to find a place that would want him to be there as much as he wanted to be there.Īnthony Bourdain included Langston Hughes’s book I Wonder as I Wander on a list of his favorite books. It drove him to go to Paris, to Africa, to Harlem, and many parts beyond. Books fueled the flame for him to be all of those things and more. I don’t think that Langston Hughes would have ever been a writer, a poet, or a world traveller if he had never been a reader. I love that line: “books began to happen to me.” Langston Hughes found misery in Kansas, but he also found a way to escape it. Few find paradise, but eventually, most people discover that they can make a good life for themselves almost anywhere. People have spent lifetimes searching the planet for the place that speaks to them in ways that makes them never want to leave. I think it is hard to know where we are supposed to be. What an engaging smile! It is almost impossible not to smile back at him. This is one of my favorite author pictures. And where almost always the mortgage got paid off, the good knights won, and the Alger boy triumphed.” Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome living with my grandmother. ”When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me.

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes