Andress Floyd

Andress Small Floyd was an American writer and social reformer best known for My Monks of Vagabondia (1913). In the book’s introduction, he says the stories were drawn from real experiences with men he worked alongside through the Self Master movement, an effort aimed at helping people rebuild their lives through work, shelter, and self-discipline.

Project Gutenberg’s text of My Monks of Vagabondia also preserves Floyd’s own note that he had founded and carried on this work for the previous five years, and that the book was connected to the practical support of the community he and his wife, Lillian Blanche Floyd, made possible. That gives his writing a personal, documentary quality as well as a literary one.

Although widely known today mainly through this book, Floyd stands out as a writer whose pages were shaped by lived experience rather than distant observation. His voice is warm, moral without being stiff, and deeply interested in people on the margins.