Background
Josiah Flynt was the third child and second son of Oliver Atherton and Mary (Bannister) Willard. He was born on January 23, 1869 in Appleton, Wis. , but grew up in Evanston, Ill. , where his father, a retired Methodist minister and one-time editor of the Chicago Post, was a professor in the Biblical Institute. Frances E. Willard was Josiah's aunt. His father died when the boy was eight years old. The pious atmosphere of his home and the town was oppressive to him, though he was devoted to his mother, grandmother, and sisters. All the members of the family, as a matter of fact, were restless and had a liking for travel.
Education
From early childhood, Josiah manifested a tendency to run away from home and from the boarding-school he attended. When he was fifteen, his mother and his two sisters went to Germany, where the mother conducted a school for girls in Berlin for more than twenty years. She left Josiah attending a small college in Illinois and boarding with an attorney, a friend of the family. Disgruntled at losing an essay contest, Josiah left college and could not be persuaded to return. He was now nearing twenty-one. His mother helped him to enter the University of Berlin, where he studied fitfully for several years, political economy being his major subject.
Career
Work was found for him on a kinsman's farm in Pennsylvania, but he presently strayed from there to Buffalo, where he found a job in the railroad yards as a car checker. Within a week he stepped into a buggy which he found on the street, drove the horse back to Pennsylvania, and sold the outfit. Returning to the farm, he stole another horse and buggy at a fair but was caught and sent to a reform school. In later years he wrote for the Forum (February 1897) an article, "The Criminal in the Open, " which was based on this experience. He fled from the reform school after a time, lived as a tramp for eight months, was caught sleeping in a freight car in Utica, N. Y. , and served thirty days in jail. These experiences bore fruit in his writings later. He then worked for a time on a New York farm, decided to follow his mother to Germany, and worked his way across the ocean as a coal-passer.
About 1890 or 1891 he visited England, became acquainted with Arthur Symons and other literary folk, and wrote an article on "The American Tramp" for the Contemporary Review (August 1891). Returning to Berlin, he alternately studied at the university and lived and worked in a workingmen's colony near the city. In 1896 he traveled in Russia and for a time was a laborer on Tolstoi's estate. Meanwhile, he was doing much writing. In 1898 he returned to America to embark on a career as an author, but was immediately asked by the general manager of the Pennsylvania Railroad, L. F. Loree, to inspect the policing which the company had set up in an effort to rid itself of tramps. He spent several months at this job and discussed some of his findings in magazine articles which in 1900 were gathered into a book, Notes of an Itinerant Policeman. In 1899 his first book, Tramping with Tramps, had appeared. During the next few years he wrote many articles for the leading magazines of the country. A fictionized picture of the partnership between law and crime, The Powers That Prey, was published in 1900, with Francis Walton as collaborator. Other books appeared rapidly; The World of Graft (1901) - Willard is said to have brought the word "graft" into general use from underworld slang - The Little Brother: a Story of Tramp Life (1902), Willard's only sustained attempt at fiction, and The Rise of Ruderick Clowd (1903). By this time he was drinking heavily, and a friend procured a place for him as a car tracer on a railroad in the Indian Territory, where liquor was theoretically prohibited; but in a few months he went back to Chicago. In 1905 he received a commission from a magazine to visit Russia. He was in bad physical condition from drinking, but went, wrote a number of articles, was stricken with illness in Germany and came near to dying. He returned to America broken in health. In 1906 a magazine sent him to Chicago to investigate poolroom gambling; but in January 1907, he became ill, would not have a physician or nurse until he was past help, and died of pneumonia.
Personality
He was small and frail in body.
Willard had been a heavy smoker since the age of nine and a long-time alcoholic.
