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

by Ben Montgomery Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

Overview

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world—backwards.

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, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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.)

From the Publisher

"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

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170177660
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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