“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. 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.
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