Will I love The Road?

Well-known American author Jack London experienced a genuine decline into vagrancy in the US during the late nineteenth century.

In his 1907 memoir, he depicts the realities of the vagrant’s life without flinching. The detailed descriptions of begging for sustenance from strangers’ homes, risking death to evade detection on fright trains, and the life of inmates in the state penitentiary are as gripping as they are appalling.

The only US book in this collection of recommendations, The Road confirms very similar experiences and challenges facing the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jack London lived and died before Kerouac was born, so it’s more accurate to say that On the Road channels the spirit of London’s book, published some 50 years before Kerouac’s masterpiece. The Road is a compelling memoir about tramping across the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. London anticipates Kerouac’s bohemian spirit as he rides the rails with vagabonds, hoboes, and tramps (as London explains, there’s a difference among them). To my mind, The Road is an underappreciated American classic, poetically evoking that quintessential American characteristic, restlessness—the deep-seated desire to “follow the breeze.” Fifty years later,… show more.

London is famous, not only for the gripping quality of his prose, but for his larger-than-life globe-hopping adventures. For me, The Road reduces all of that to a personal, intimate level. Though written over a hundred years ago, these experiences of the young London making his way as best he can, without means or motive – other than survival – echoes perfectly the plight, and the challenges, and the choices so many face today.

The Road is a fun, and at times fanciful, autobiographical collection of Jack London's experiences as a hobo riding the rails across America during the Depression of the 1890s. An entertaining, informative travel adventure from America's dean of adventure writers.