HARD TRAVELLIN': The Hobo and His History

by Kenneth Allsop ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 1968

Hobo"" here comprises a variety of picaresque Americans: skid row bus and seasonal workers, cowboys and Wobblies, congenital drifters and jacks-of-all trades, with side glances at Negro migrants and 30's youth packs, all ""moving along the interstices of the Good Life."" Allsop, a British writer who travelled 9000 miles in search of lore, is rather disorganized and given to pop sociology (at best, acute and witty, at worst ""The arising of the factory caused a swerve into an ecology arrived at in Britain 40 years earlier""). But his immensely interesting material speaks for itself, and the main thread of his commentary is sound: the hobo mocked the Protestant ethic, exposed the myth of universal abundance, and burlesqued the American pride in mobility, so that the 19th- and 20th-century public regarded him as both an enviably happy dog and a disgusting, miserable, subversive outcast. Allsop traces the wandrer's image from Huck Finn and Jack London to Chaplin and Norman Rockwell's Post covers--which disinfected the sordid realities of persecution from the outside, and suffering and sexual perversion on the inside. In addition to some wonderful songs, interviews and photographs, Allsop has gathered excerpts from critics and journalists (during the 1870's depression, e.g., they advocated drowning, shooting or poisoning tramps). Though post- Kerouac phenomena like ""hippies"" and motorcyclists are neglected, the book succeeds in evoking the echt hobo life of missions, jungles, freightyards and perilous trains. . . and the mixture of scorn, fear and sentimentality which has always distorted the picture of the American tramp.

Pub Date: March 18, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: New American Library

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION