The Road

The Road travelled by Jack London (Rutgers) is quite a different one. The first in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives: Chronicles of Alternative America series, London’s Road contains all of the stories that he wrote about his hobo days at the turn of the nineteenth century, riding the rails with tramps who sported “monicas” like New York Tommy, Pacific Slim and Syracuse Shine. In “Hoboes That Pass in the Night,” London tells how he tramped “clear across Canada over three thousand miles of railroad” in 1894, following close on the heels of a hobo named Skysail Jack. Starting in Montreal, he rides “side door Pullmans” (boxcars) on the Canadian Pacific, through Ottawa (“with one exception, the hardest town in the United States and Canada to beg clothes in”), over the Rockies and down the Fraser River to Vancouver, always one step behind Skysail Jack. All nine essays are vivid and compelling; the best of the lot is “Holding Her Down.” Here London describes the tactical battles waged between the “cons” (conductors) and the hoboes, as the latter attempt to hop a train and “hold her down” until the end of the line (this story formed the basis of Emperor of the North Pole, a 1973 movie with Ernest Borgnine as a brutal conductor determined to prevent a stubborn tramp—played by Lee Marvin— from riding the rails). The Road is stirring stuff, and it shows why Jack London was at one time (as the book’s introduction reminds us) “the most famous author in the world, the first modern literary celebrity, and the first writer to earn a million dollars from his work.”