Overview

Former oil worker, untutored philosopher, dreamer, man of laughter possessed with an indomitable spirit, seventy-three-year-old Simon McKeever runs away from a shabby state-run home for the elderly in Sacramento and hitch-hikes a ride to Los Angeles, in search of a cure for his arthritis. In the course of his personal odyssey on the road, McKeever – a modern working-class Everyman – will find something much more precious than a medical miracle: a realization that will enable him to bequeath to humankind his hard-won personal truth and thereby “move the world one inch forward”. In this technically flawless novel, now reprinted for the first time after its original American publication in 1949, Maltz elevates literature of the common man to high art, providing a life-affirming, enduring message of ordinary courage and heroism.

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9780714550800

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Reviews

I can’t tell you how excited I am about Simon McKeever * Henry Fonda * A book that will help others on the road of life. There’s pathos and humor here. * Kirkus Review * In this tightly plotted short novel, Maltz achieves an effect all too rare in current fiction, an affirmation of faith in man’s courage, man’s will to put things right in a badly off-centre world. * New York Times * An appealing and heart-warming story of the essential dignity of man. * New York Herald Tribune *

Author Information

Albert Maltz (1908–85) was a prizewinning American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. His novel The Cross and the Arrow, about the German resistance to the Nazi regime, was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during the Second World War. He worked on a number of films, including Casablanca, until he was blacklisted during McCarthyism. He is best remembered today for his novels A Tale of One January and The Journey of Simon McKeever.

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