The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

W. H. Davies was twenty-two when he walked away from his grandfather's pub in Wales and never looked back. For seven years he wandered through the violent underworld of late nineteenth-century America and Britain, hopping freight trains, begging for meals, sleeping in hobo jungles and police cells. He crossed Canada to join the Klondike gold rush, and in 1899, while hopping a moving train, his foot was crushed so badly it had to be amputated. All the wildness, he wrote, was taken out of him. But first he lived it. This is that life before the accident: raw, unsentimental, surprisingly funny, told in prose so precise that George Bernard Shaw commended it to literary experts for style alone. Davies had no formal education, yet he earned praise from both conservative Georgians and the modernist vanguard, including Ezra Pound. The book reads like a rogue's confession and a poet's eye witnessing the brutal beauty of the road. It predates Jack London and Jack Kerouac by decades, yet feels just as urgent. If you've ever wondered what it actually means to be free, and what it costs, this is the answer.