Fourteen years ago, when it was first published,
Wanderer
startled the reading world. Here was no simple narrative of a sea voyage, and here was the antithesis of a self-serving Hollywood memoir.
Sterling Hayden was at the peak of his earning power as a star when he suddenly quit. He walked out on Hollywood, walked out of a shattered marriage, defied the courts, and, broke and an outlaw, set sail with his four children in the schooner
—bound for the South Seas.
Long before he was an actor, Hayden was a seaman. He had sailed before the mast and as mate and captain in sailing ships. He had been a Grand Banks fisherman. Then Hollywood offered him a screen test. Pushed to stardom, he became the leading man to one of the screen's most beautiful women, and the money began to flow. With money and fame, however, came a gnawing dissatisfaction with his life.
His attempt to escape launches this autobiography. It is the candid, sometimes painfully revealing confession of a man who scrutinizes his every self-defeat and self-betrayal in the unblinking light of conscience. It is also the triumph of a complex and contradictory man, still a rebel and a seeker, undefeated by his failure to find himself in love, adventure, drink, or escape to the South Seas.
It is, as Eugene Burdick said of it, "utterly fascinating, written by a man who has been able to achieve an honesty about himself which is almost unique."