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

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

By W.H. Davies
Preface by George Bernard Shaw

By W.H. Davies
Preface by George Bernard Shaw

Best Seller

Part of Neversink

Ebook $9.99

Nov 08, 2011 | 336 Pages

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies
Ebook
Nov 08, 2011 | 336 Pages

Ebook
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  • Ebook $9.99

    Nov 08, 2011 | 336 Pages

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About The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

A vagrant de Tocqueville gives an eloquent, dry-eyed report of his tramping adventures in the violent underworld of late 19th century America and Britain

An untutored Welsh tramp who became a popular poet acclaimed by the conservative Georgians and the vanguard Ezra Pound alike, W. H. Davies surprised his contemporaries with the unlikeliest portrait of the artist as a young man ever written.

After 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. From 1893 to 1899 he was schooled by the hard men of the road, disdaining regular work and subsisting by begging. Crossing Canada to join the “Klondyke” gold rush, Davies fell while hopping a train. His foot was crushed and his leg amputated. “All the wildness had been taken out of me,” Davies wrote, “and my adventures after this were not of my own seeking.”

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.”

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Product Details

Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Travel Writing

Ebook | $9.99
Published by Melville House
Nov 08, 2011 | 336 Pages | ISBN 9781612190242

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Praise

“Davies and Kerouac are so similar it’s like they have had the same illness. !ey kept searching, longing, moving. . . !ey are mesmerising narrators. . . [Davies’s] story has the tension and suspense of a man whose life and soul is in jeopardy.”

The Times (London)

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