The Man Who Walked Backward: An American Dreamer's Search for Meaning in the Great Depression

by Ben Montgomery

Overview

Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary-something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world-backwards.

In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Bucharest, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781549145957
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ben Montgomery is a former enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com, and author of Grandma Gatewood's Walk. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. He lives in Tampa with his three children.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

1 Those Golden Days 3

2 Doing Something 18

3 Dirt Devils and Details 36

4 Postcards and Publicity 45

5 Where the Grass Grew the Thickest 51

6 Round, Spinning 62

7 Rubble and Race 66

8 Standoff at the Red River 76

9 Just Human, Same As You 84

10 The Intent Is Sublime 97

11 American Dream 103

12 Bone Dry Forever 111

13 Don't Stop 128

14 An Ounce of Attention 140

15 Are You Crazy? 145

16 Mopery in the Second Degree 154

17 Choices and Consequences 162

18 Persevering Pedalist 166

19 Bamboozled 175

20 Reverse in Wedded State 189

21 Vengeance 195

22 Powder Keg 203

23 Hinterlands 212

24 A Year on Foot 218

25 Murder Jail 228

26 Going Back, Forward, Upright 238

27 Lone Star 248

Epilogue 258

Acknowledgments 275

Bibliography 277

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

07/16/2018
The Great Depression’s rampant unemployment sparked countless record-breaking attempts; Amelia Earhart’s famed transatlantic flight, for example, but also desperate novelty acts that captured the public’s attention. Montgomery’s cheerful narrative focuses on the latter, specifically one perpetrated by the ever-optimistic Plennie Wingo, who, having lost his businesses after being busted for selling alcohol during Prohibition, set out in 1931 to walk backward around the world, hoping that he could cash in by shilling for businesses along his way. Wingo’s adventures through the Dust Bowl–ravaged South, Bulgarian archaeological sites, and even 1931 Berlin, which was obsessed with new politician Adolf Hitler, see him stroll backward through many of the era’s historically significant events. The small-town Texan had a knack for marketing, but it is his genuine interest in people—regardless of race, color, or religion—that shines through: he befriends a black family in Pennsylvania and serendipitously enjoys tea with Queen Maria of Yugoslavia. Montgomery corroborates Wingo’s own written account with multiple news stories from places along the 8,000-mile route, making it all the more striking when discrepancies suddenly arise between Wingo’s account of his Turkish adventure, which resulted in a mysterious source of money, and that of the U.S. government, which investigated him over the money. After a year and a half, he returned home claiming success. Writing for casual readers, Montgomery keeps the focus on the human interest narrative, resulting in a light, enjoyable, telling of Wingo’s walk backward into the record books. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Wielding both the big brush historical context and fine comb of biographical detail, Montgomery's text reads as good literature, taking a seemingly peculiar stunt and drawing out the humanity of the man and his era. All American history readers should wander and wonder with Wingo, whose tale is elegantly sketched out here."—Jeffrey Meyer, Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Engaging...In clean, briskly paced prose, Montgomery follows Plennie's journey, and he walks the reader backward, too, into the history of America in the 1930s and before."—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

"Ben Montgomery is a joy and a wonder, a writer I would happily follow halfway around the world — backward. In fact, I just did, in the compelling company of Plennie L. Wingo, the retrograde ambulator of Abilene, Texas. What a book!"—David Von Drehl, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America and Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year

From Rip Van Winkle to Forrest Gump, Americans have fallen in love with quirky individualists who find their true worth by lighting out into the territory. They were fictional. Plennie Wingo, the man who decided to walk across the globe backward, was real. Wingo turned his back on the Great Depression, an adventure brought to life by the vivid narration of Ben Montgomery, a writer so talented I could read him walking backward."—Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools

"In The Man Who Walked Backward, Ben Montgomery lovingly assembles a mosaic of the United States and the world between the wars, told through the life of a small-town Texan who refused to accept his miserable lot during the Depression. Montgomery's vivid storytelling resurrects the strange and wonderful Plennie Wingo, a new American Everyman."
—Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night

From the Publisher

2018-07-02
From the strange-but-true annals, a wild ride through the Depression era, one foot at a time.Plennie Wingo (1895-1993) was an Abilene restaurateur who got on the wrong side of the revenuers by buying and selling bootleg alcohol during Prohibition. He wasn't alone: By Montgomery's (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, 2014) account, half of the court cases in 1928 in Texas had to do with booze. Nor was he alone in seeing his finances crumble to dust in the stock market crash and ensuing yearslong financial downturn. But Wingo was nothing if not entrepreneurial, and he hit on an idea that was both fundraiser and protest—and, writes the author at an appropriately onrushing pace, "when a certain kind of man has a certain kind of idea, one that he considers good, that good idea takes hold of him and it swells behind his eyeballs and expands, balloon-like, so big that it crowds out all the other thoughts and ideas." That idea was to walk across America, and maybe Europe, too, backward, selling postcards and other mementos of his madcap endeavor to support his family. It worked: Wingo remains in the record books, and he saw history unfold and had wondrous and sometimes fraught experiences ("he had barely made it through the gate of a fortified village at the foot of the ancient Bohemian castle when he noticed that the peasants seemed like they wanted to kill him"). There's a feel at times that Montgomery is bewitched by the open spaces; his many-paged reverie on the Great Plains and their Indigenous inhabitants ("the Indians submitted and the buffalo rotted and the plains sat empty") seems as if it really belongs in another book. Still, following Wingo's travels makes for a pleasing enough read.A minor-episode-in-history yarn that gets spun out a couple of dozen pages too long but that has legs all the same.

Kirkus Reviews