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

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.

Contains an introduction by Patrick Chura, Distinguished Professor, University of Akron

Calder Publications was founded by John Calder in 1949, and became known for the edgy and avant-garde writers it was proud of having in its list. Calder Publications, an imprint of Alma Books, offers a list of books which will challenge and stimulate the serious readers.

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.