In 1935, Pyle left his position as managing editor at the "Daily News" to write his own national column as a roving reporter of human-interest stories for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate. Over the next six years, from 1935 until early 1942, Pyle and his wife, Jerry, whom Pyle identified in his columns as "That Girl who rides with me," traveled the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and South America, writing about the interesting places he saw and people he met. Pyle's column, published under the title of the "Hoosier Vagabond," appeared six days a week in Scripps-Howard newspapers. The articles became popular with readers, earning Pyle national notoriety in the years preceding his even bigger fame as a war correspondent during World War II. Selected columns of Pyle's human interest stories were later compiled in "Home Country" (1947),