France held a special value for Langston Hughes even before he first visited Paris. "I will never forget the thrill of first understanding the French of de Maupassant," he writes in The Big Sea (1940). "I think it was de Maupassant who made me really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far away lands would read them--even after I was dead." Perhaps drawn by this spiritual bond, Hughes saw Paris as "a dream come true" when he first visited the city, and later he made it a personal symbol of civilization triumphant over the barbarous forces of fascism.

Following a decision to break with "everything unpleasant and miserable" out of his past, Hughes at twenty-one took a job as mess boy on an Africa-bound merchant ship, beginning a life of travel that would last until World War II ended his...