Harry L. Foster

Harry La Tourette Foster (1895, Brooklyn, New York City, USA — 15 March 1932, Queens, New York City) was an American travel writer, a First World War veteran and ​“a tropical tramp at heart” who visited Cambodia in 1922 as the ultimate ​‘Beachcomber in the Orient’ wandering through Asia from Japan to Southeast Asia.

Harry Foster, who had studied at Newton Academy and Lafayette College, was a young reporter with The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper when he decided to attend the officers’ training camp at Madison Barracks, N. Y., and to join the WWI front as second lieutenant of the Company M, 309th Infantry Regiment of the US Army. As a grunt, he fought at Hasebrouck and at Arras, coming back home as a first lieutenant in 1918. He served as an instructor in modern warfare on the Mexico-US border when, profoundly disturbed by his war experience, he resolved to jump off the boat and started wandering through South America, reaching Peru and Northern Chile.

The account of this first trip, illustrated with his photographs — as he supported his travels with some freelancing work -, met some success and immediately after its publication he was sailing again, this time eastbound, reaching Hong Kong in 1922, visiting Phnom Penh where he tried in vain to get a glimpse of the dancers of the Royal Ballet, and trodding his way from Battambang and Pailin up to Bangkok. Then it was the Malay States, Java, Singapore, Japan, and back to the USA, from which he kept venturing into the Caribbean, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua. 

Foster’s writing style was straightforward and devoid of exoticism, revealing a keen eye for telling details. In 1926, his New York editor sent him to the ​“South Seas” ​“with express instructions to ​“dine with cannibals, investigate wild vamps [whatever they might be], if necessary jump overboard with knife between teeth and fight man-eating sharks, but tell the truth about it” [Rod Ewins, ​“Photographs from A Vagabond in Fiji, Pacific,” JustPacific Blog]. His last known book, published in 1930, covered North Africa, the ​‘Barbary Coast’. 

A member of the Adventurers and Explorers Club — an unformal and easy going nose-thumbing to the very posh and serious Explorers Club founded in New York in 1904 -, Harry Foster still fascinated his contemporaries when he died prematurely (of pneumonia) in 1932. The headers of his obituary in the New York Times [21 March 1932] read: 

HARRY L FOSTER, WRITER, DIES AT 37; World War Veteran Had Traveled Widely in Latin America, Caribbees and Orient. WROTE OF HIS ADVENTURES Had Been Newspaper Reporter in Brooklyn, Embassy Attaché in Peru, Stoker on Ships.

Harry L. Foster, Bangkok, 1922.

Harry Foster’s itinerary across Asia, 1922.

Battambang City, market, 1922 [photo by Harry Foster]

During his adventurous life, he had also worked worked as a miner, a tourist guide, a stowaway on tramp steamships, and assorted odd jobs. Was he ​‘The ​‘Beachcomber’ another adventurous traveler and fellow countryman, Harry Hervey, stumbled upon on the quays of Batavia in 1923, as he described it in his Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East (1922)? Did he inspire the imaginary, pennyless but ever-curious narrator-wanderer in Frederik Prokosh’s The Asiatics (1930)? 

Publications

[ADB Note: Harry Foster’s books have been reprinted on several occasions [his first one, Adventures of a Tropical Tramp, had 31 new editions as per 2025. However, most of these reprints or e‑versions are truncated or stripped of the author’s photographs illustrating the original editions]. 

• The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp, 1922; repr. Dixon Price Publishing, 2000, 220 p. ISBN 9781929516162.
• A Beachcomber in the Orient, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1923, 385 p.; repr. Island Trader Media, 2019, 318 p.; 
  ISBN 978 – 1916403307.
• A Gringo in Mañana-Land, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company,1924.
• A Vagabond in Fiji, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company,1927.
• Combing the Caribbees, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925; repr. Legare Street Press, 2023, 362 p. ISBN‎ 978 – 1020803000.
• A Vagabond in Barbary, 1930.
• [co-author with Wynn Proctor] Savages Under the Skin, drama produced by Carl Reed at Greenwich Village Theater [Broadway], NYC, March-April 1927.