Richard Wright said that Langston Hughes lived by a rule of "ceaseless movement," a remark possibly inspired by Hughes's comment to Wright that "six months in one place is long enough to make one's life complicated." The title of the second volume of Hughes's autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, serves as a motto for Hughes's nomadic life. In Langston Hughes, Meltzer describes Hughes's early life with his mother moving among relatives throughout the Midwest, his father fleeing to Mexico, and Hughes himself being sent to stay with other relatives when his mother cannot care for him. Hughes's constant traveling in his adult years can be seen as a search for home ground, a search made more burdensome by the difficulties encountered by any black American hoping to feel at home in the United States.

Some of the choices Hughes makes about where he lives are economically motivated...