Before I Walked With Spring: The Doughboy Odyssey and Other Poems of World War II

Describing the beginning of his historic 1948 Appalachian Trail hike, Earl Shaffer wrote: "And now the time had come. This was the threshold of my great adventure, long delayed by World War II and without my trail partner, who had been killed on Iwo Jima. Those 4-1/2 years of army service, more than half of it in combat areas of the Pacific, without furlough or even rest leave, had left me confused and depressed. Perhaps this trip would be the answer." That trip was his 2000 mile walk from Georgia to Maine, the first continuous hike of the Appalachian Trail, the subject of his first book, "Walking With Spring." Appropriately entitled "Before I Walked With Spring," this new book of poetry serves as a prequel to his first book as well as a soldier’s first-person account of World War II. He leads the reader on an island-hopping “Doughboy Odyssey” that covers tens of thousands of miles, giving insight into the traumas that helped propel him to become the Appalachian Trail's first thruhiker.