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.