Koestler had come to inspect the accomplishments of the Soviet Five Year Plan in backward areas such as Ashkhabad, while Hughes was enjoying a free vacation at the expense of the Russians after the movie he had come to Russia to make had turned into a fiasco. Hughes and Koestler met by chance in Ashkhabad in 1932, and it is interesting to compare their accounts of the weeks they spent together in Russian Central Asia. These men, particularly those who joined the Communist Party, were afflicted, wherever they went by an all-embracing purpose which made it difficult for them to see anything except in relation to that purpose. Orwell chose to go down and out in Paris and London, and Koestler's trips to Palestine, Russia, and Spain were motivated by prior and (he thought) complete ideological commitments to Zionism, Communism, and finally the Popular Front.

The difference is that the travels of the latter group often served some carefully thought out intellectual purpose, and Hughes never cared much for ideology. But Hughes' story is not much like those of such men as Stephen Spender, Louis Aragon, Louis Fischer, George/Orwell, and Arthur Koestler. With stops in Russia during the 'heroic days' of the second Five Year Plan and in Spain in 1937, Langston Hughes' journey from 1930 to 1937 paralleled those of many writers and journalists born around 1900. In Haiti he started to think about making poetry pay, and during the next few years which took him from Port an Prince to Havana, through the south via New York to San Francisco, and then to Moscow, Tashkent, Tokyo, Shanghai, Carmel, California, Mexico City, Harlem, Cleveland, Madrid, and finally Paris, he got along. He knew pretty well by then that he wanted to be a writer, but it was not so easy for a Negro to get a living out of writing. In that time he was writing poems too, and a novel, Not Without Laughter, which earned him a $400 award, which was what he had in 1929 when he lost his patron and decided to go to Haiti for a while. He graduated in 1929, and had worked in a hat store, on a truck farm, in a flower shop, and as a doorman, second cook, waiter, beach-comber, bum, and seaman, on the way. So, when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing.' Hughes had been a long time getting through college. When I was twenty-eight my personal crash came. 'When I was twenty-seven,' he begins, 'the stock-market crash came. The book, which he calls an autobiographical journey, describes Hughes' travellings from 1930 to 1937.

'Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again,' Langston Hughes writes in I Wonder as I Wander.

I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes