The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot

Walker Farr has chosen his feet over a desk, his wandering over wealth, and his freedom over the comfortable prison of early 20th-century expectations. As he walks the dusty New England byways, he encounters a world in transition: farmers suspicious of drifters, wealthy automobile owners speeding past the human scenery, and most fatefully, Kat Kilgour, a young woman whose presence stirs something in his philosophic soul. But Day's novel isn't merely a romantic idyll of the open road. It carries a fierce anger at the industrial age already poisoning America's water and corrupting its conscience. A devastating scene where polluted municipal water kills a child brings the book's social criticism to searing life: the wealthy send poison through pipes to those too poor to escape it. Day champions walking as a way of being alive, of remaining uncaged by convention while witnessing firsthand the costs of progress.