There was Vagabond Literature before Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and there always will be; vagrants and tramps who write, and others such as ‘Wolfi Landstreicher’, nom-de-plume of a contemporary anarchist philosopher (who edited a Journal called “Wilful Disobedience” from 1996 to 2005).
Landstreicher / Vagabond brings back to mind the pivotal photograph taken by August Sander (1874-1964): “Vagrants 1929” in which two older men stare back at the camera with an uncanny mix of swagger and shame; two Burger und Hoffmann down on their luck on a country road. Why pivotal? The image marks the end of a mitteleuropa tradition of rags-to-riches/riches-to-rags wandering, including the ending of the contemporary itinerant lives of Joseph Roth and Robert Walser in hotel bedrooms and sanitoria.
For the Anglophone world pitch forward via Beckett’s country road and WG Sebald’s East Anglia (The Rings of Saturn) as well as back to the street-walkers and writers of ‘Strange Cases’ such as Hazlitt, Borrow, Thomas de Quincy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others.