The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies

He was Welsh and had family living in Wales, whom he would occasionally visit. He lived by begging, by hawking, as a migrant worker harvesting crops, by tending cattle on cattle-boats crossing the ocean back and forth between Baltimore and Liverpool. He travelled by train, riverboat and foot, never buying a ticket. Davies (1871-1940) writes of the five years, 1893-1899, he spent as a vagabond tramping across the US, Canada and England.

Praised by Osbert Sitwell for his “primitive splendour and directness,” Davies evokes the beauty and frontier violence of turn-of-the-century America in prose that George Bernard Shaw commended to “literary experts for its style alone.” The insurgent wanderlust that found an American voice in Jack London and Jack Kerouac is expressed here in a raucous true adventure story by the man Shaw called “the incorrigible Supertramp who wrote this amazing book.” “All the wildness had been taken out of me,” Davies wrote, “and my adventures after this were not of my own seeking.” His foot was crushed and his leg amputated. Crossing Canada to join the “Klondyke” gold rush, Davies fell while hopping a train. From 1893 to 1899 he was schooled by the hard men of the road, disdaining regular work and subsisting by begging. Davies surprised his contemporaries with the unlikeliest portrait of the artist as a young man ever written.Īfter a delinquent childhood Davies renounced home and apprenticeship and at twenty-two sailed to America-the first of more than a dozen Atlantic crossings, often made by cattle boat. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.A vagrant de Tocqueville gives an eloquent, dry-eyed report of his tramping adventures in the violent underworld of late 19th century America and BritainĪn untutored Welsh tramp who became a popular poet acclaimed by the conservative Georgians and the vanguard Ezra Pound alike, W.

When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere.

His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists and to drink.

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies