Jack London · 1907 · road

Jack London's account of the year he spent as a hobo in 1894, written when he was famous. He rides the freights across America, marches with Kelly's Army, does thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary for sleeping out at Niagara Falls, and comes home a socialist. It predates Orwell by thirty years and Kerouac by fifty.

1. 1
   Oakland

   An eighteen-year-old who has already been an oyster pirate and a sealer takes to the road in 1894 - and the book is written thirteen years later by a famous novelist who has not forgotten a single trick of it.

2. 2
   Sacramento

   The road-kids of the Sacramento yards, and the apprenticeship: how to hold her down when the crew is trying to throw you off, and what happens to a gay-cat who stays a novice too long.

3. 3
   Cheyenne

   He falls in with Kelly's Army in Wyoming - two thousand unemployed men marching on Washington in the depression year, one of several such armies, and the chapter London titles Two Thousand Stiffs.

4. 4
   Des Moines

   The army builds a flotilla and goes down the Des Moines River, and London and a few others get ahead of it in the fastest boats and eat the towns' charity before the rest arrive - which he reports without much shame.

5. 5
   Hannibal

   The army falls apart on the Mississippi and he leaves it - alone again on the freights, going east through country where a tramp is a criminal by definition.

6. 6
   Chicago

   The great railway hub, and the mechanics of a life spent begging at back doors with a story invented on the spot for whoever opens - which London says is where he learned to write fiction.

7. 7
   Niagara Falls

   He goes to see the falls, sleeps out, and is picked up at dawn by a policeman - sentenced to thirty days without being allowed to plead, along with everyone else in the line that morning.

8. 8
   Buffalo

   The Erie County Penitentiary, which he calls a place of unprintable horrors - a month inside that turns a young adventurer into a socialist, and which he says he can only half describe in print.

9. 9
   New York

   Out and east to Manhattan, where a first encounter with a New York policeman teaches him to shy away from bulls forever - and where the American leg of the tramping ends.

10. 10
    Vancouver

    West across Canada on the freights and home by sea - a year on the road that produced a socialist, a writer, and the book that came before Orwell and long before Kerouac.