Jim Tully · 1924 · road

A bestseller in 1924 and the first great American hobo book - twenty years before Kerouac and thirty after Jack London's The Road. Tully left St Marys, Ohio at fifteen and spent six years in boxcars, hobo jungles and back doorways, reading his way through every public library he could reach.

1. 1
   St Marys

   Western Ohio, and the son of an Irish ditch-digger whose mother died when he was six - he chooses the road over a deadening job and takes his first freight in 1901, aged fifteen, which is where the book opens.

2. 2
   Cincinnati

   St Joseph's orphanage, where his father sent him and his siblings and where he spent six years before running - and the city he took his road name from, because of his hair: Cincinnati Red.

3. 3
   Chicago

   The greatest rail hub in America and the hardest yards to work - and election day in Chicago, one of the set pieces, seen entirely from the level of men with nothing who are being counted by men who have everything.

4. 4
   The Mississippi

   A church baptism in the river, watched by a boy who has been sleeping in a jungle - Tully learned from Twain and London that a reader needs a sense of place, and gives it again and again.

5. 5
   Leadville

   Ten thousand feet up in the Colorado Rockies, washing dishes in a mining camp - one of the jobs a road kid took when the weather turned, alongside chain-making, tree surgery and small-circuit boxing.

6. 6
   Kent

   Six years on the road end in an Ohio chain factory, and then a library card - and a man who stole books when he could not borrow them becomes, with Hammett, one of the inventors of American hard-boiled prose.