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As a teenager in the 1890s, Jack London left home to ride the rails across America as a hobo, and here he tells how it was done: begging for meals at back…
As a teenager in the 1890s, Jack London left home to ride the rails across America as a hobo, and here he tells how it was done: begging for meals at back doors with invented life stories, 'holding down' trains by riding underneath the carriages and on their roofs, dodging brakemen and railway police, and joining Kelly's army of unemployed men on its way to Washington in 1894. He also tells of thirty days in the brutal Erie County Penitentiary in New York for vagrancy.
Context and significance
London published these sketches in 1907, and they inspired later writers of the road such as Jack Kerouac. They show the experiences that made him a socialist. Read The Call of the Wild and The Iron Heel, and see his life.
About the author
Jack London (1876–1916) grew up poor in San Francisco and Oakland and lived a life as wild as his books: an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor on a sealing ship to Japan, a tramp, a socialist agitator and a gold seeker in the Klondike in 1897, where he caught scurvy and gathered material for a lifetime.
The Call of the Wild made him famous in 1903, and he became one of the best-paid writers of his day, producing White Fang, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden among more than fifty books. He died on his California ranch at forty.