“While [Langston] Hughes was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., he saw poet Vachel Lindsay dining in the restaurant. Hughes slipped three poems under Lindsay’s plate, including his now-famous “The Weary Blues.” Impressed, Lindsay called for the busboy and asked who wrote the poems, and Hughes responded that he did. Lindsay read Hughes’s poems at a public performance that night and introduced him to publishers. The next day, a local newspaper ran an article about the “Negro busboy poet,” and reporters and diners flocked to meet him. The next year, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.”
Vachel Lindsay himself took a couple of long-distance walking tours where he eschewed carrying money and would knock on strangers' doors each night to offer his poetry in exchange for food and shelter. His book about one of these tours is fascinating, it was a very different time in America: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67947
