Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

THE MAN WHO WALKED BACKWARD

Ben Montgomery

An American Dreamer’s Search for Meaning in the Great Depression

Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, this is the story of a real-life Forrest Gump - a Texas man named Plennie Wingo (I kid you not) who, in 1931, set out to walk backwards around the world.

You might be thinking: WHY? It was a strange time. During the days of the Great Depression the jobless often resorted to stunts to get attention, publicity and, if you dared to dream, sponsors or advertising money. The flagpole sitters graduated to the guy who pushed a peanut up the side of a mountain - with his nose; from feats of derring-do to the just plain peculiar. All it took was a little imagination about what might captivate the public.

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.

Ben Montgomery is a former enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com. 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. He is the author of Grandma Gatewood's Walk.

Available products
Book Published 2018-09-18 by Little, Brown
Book Published 2018-09-18 by Little, Brown

Comments

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. [H]istory readers should wander and wonder with Wingo, whose tale is elegantly sketched out here.

Through Wingo, who wore eyeglasses with rear-facing mirrors, this biography provides a "Forrest Gump"-like glimpse of a world that was, in many ways, moving backward, too; Wingo's travels brought him close to lynch mobs, hunger marchers, and Hitler, as well as to ordinary folks beaten down by the era's regressive shifts. Although Wingo's motivation remains unclear, his journal entries and correspondence impart vivid portraits.

The book has now been optioned for film by Scott Foley: Scott Kellerman Foley is an American actor, director, and screenwriter. Foley is known for roles in television shows such as The Unit, Felicity, and Scandal, and in films such as Scream 3. He has also guest starred in series including Dawson's Creek and House. Foley made his feature film writing and directing debut in 2013 with Let's Kill Ward's Wife.