A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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About This Book

A series of first-person narratives recounts an eighteen-month experiment of living and earning as an unskilled day laborer while traveling from the Northeast to the Pacific. Episodes portray encounters with fellow itinerants, railway and farm hands, and boarding-house life, detailing routines, hardships, and local characters met along the way. Vignettes alternate descriptions of specific occupations such as section-hands and burro-punchers with impressions of poverty, hospitality, and the practicalities of transient work. The work combines observational detail and personal reflection to sketch labor conditions and popular habits of the late nineteenth-century working class.

PREFACE

The following narratives, like those published in the series of “The Workers,” East and West, are drawn from notes taken during an expedition made ten years ago. In the summer of 1891 I began an experiment of earning my living as a day laborer and continued it until, in the course of eighteen months, I had worked my way from Connecticut to California.

In justice to the narratives it should be explained that they are submitted simply for what they are, the casual observations of a student almost fresh from college whose interest in life led him to undertake a work for which he had no scientific training.

W. A. W.

Princeton, October, 1901.