My Life

Josiah Flynt was nineteen years old when he walked away from everything familiar and threw himself into the underworld of American tramps, hobos, and vagrants. This autobiography traces the arc of that restless hunger from its origins in a strict Methodist childhood through his father's death and his mother's struggle to hold the family together, to his first forbidden runaway trip and the moment he discovered that confinement, for him, was not a punishment but a magnet. Flynt writes with raw honesty about the pull of the open road, the coded world of traveling men, and the shame and fascination he felt watching society from its margins. His quest for "Die Ferne" - the Beyond - was not mere wanderlust but a philosophical rebellion against respectability itself. Cut short by his death at thirty-seven, this remains one of the most candid early American accounts of opting out, a document that asks what it costs to refuse the life you're handed.