An itinerant lecturer

It is curious the way a person can adapt himself to a life apparently completely alien to that for which he was born! This whole long epoch of my life, from the time when I was forty till the time when I was fifty-five, I spent almost entirely in trains and hotels. It was a queer existence. (Autobiography )

The last lecture tour (January 5 to February 15, 1930)

A reader who wishes to tabulate the train journeys made by John Cowper in those five weeks will find that he criss-crossed backwards and forwards through eight States: Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Georgia, Texas and Virginia; that he made eighteen train journeys most of which were several hundred miles in length; that twelve of them were made at night; that he crossed and re-crossed the Mississippi six times; and that he gave over thirty lectures. Then, if the reader remembers that such feats of endurance, made often while suffering continual pain from his ulcers, had occupied Powys's life for the previous twenty-five years, he will understand that when Powys retired from lecturing and found himself free to do what he'd always wanted to do - to write - how Powys must have felt that life had just begun for him.
(Introduction to The Diary of John Cowper Powys, 1930, edited by Frederick Davies, Greymitre Books Ltd, 1987, London)