‘No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford’ Elmore Leonard
I Was Looking For a Street tells the story of the author’s childhood and adolescence as an orphan, as he moves from railroad yard to hobo tent citiy, to soup kitchen and desert around Los Angeles and across the United States. The ensuing tale is at once a picaresque adventure through Depression-era America and a portrait of the writer as a young man of seemingly little promise but great spirit.
Written late in Willeford’s career, this memoir is the work of a writer at the height of his powers looking back without nostalgia or regret, and preserving in his clear and powerful prose the great American adventure of his youth.
