Danny's Own Story

The search for belonging takes many forms. For Danny, found as a baby on a doorstep and raised by a bickering couple who needed something new to fight about, it means eighteen years of small-town drudgery before he finally throws punches with his pa and hits the road. What follows is a wandering, picaresque journey through the American heartland and beyond - Illinois to Indiana to Ohio, down into Tennessee, working as a circus roustabout, a wild man from Borneo, a Patagonian cannibal in a sideshow, always drifting, always searching for something he cannot name. He is bound by fate to Dr. Kirby, the bottle-peddler and purveyor of Siwash Indian Sagraw, a miracle elixir that promises everything and delivers nothing. This is American wanderlust before it became mythology - the open road as escape, as identity, as a way of never having to stop and find out who you really are. Don Marquis, who would later give the world the immortal archy and mehitabel, wrote this novel in 1912 with a tender, wry eye for the loneliness that hides inside comedy and the way we keep moving because staying still feels too much like drowning.