G. Bernard Shaw's witty, admiring preface frames The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp as something rarer than a tramp's tale: an unsensational, deeply honest record of poverty, wandering, and poetic genius. He presents William H. Davies as a self-taught writer of unusual dignity, whose plain style, lack of literary pretension, and hard-earned independence make the book feel fresh, human, and unforced. Shaw's endorsement prepares the reader for a life lived at the edge of respectability, where hardship is met with restraint rather than melodrama. Davies begins in a public house steeped in seafaring memory, eccentric family lore, and the rough vitality of working-class life. His childhood is unruly and comic, marked by truancy, fighting, theft, punishment, and an early love of reading that hints at a larger destiny. As youth gives way to labor, confinement, and travel, he drifts through America and back toward England, surviving by wit, luck, and whatever work he can find. Along the way, he encounters hunger, friendship, prison, danger, and the brutal freedom of life on the margins, while Shaw's preface insists that this extraordinary autobiography is also a challenge to middle-class assumptions about work, respectability, and independence. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.