An unidentified man photographed in 1907, the year Jack London published The Road. Photograph: Corbis

On April 6, 1894, Jack London boarded the most luxurious passenger train in the world, the Overland Limited, and departed Oakland, California, for a six-month, 10,000-mile journey that would change his life. London left no record of where on the train he rode that first night. The unemployed 18-year-old had no money, so he likely did not ride in one of the aptly named Palace Cars where paying passengers relaxed amid all the comforts of a Victorian drawing room. Gas chandeliers and reading lamps no doubt illuminated those gilded interiors as London ran alongside the accelerating train looking for his chance to leap aboard.

At just the right moment—“neither the moment before nor the moment after,” as he would later write about the art of train hopping—London either jumped up onto one of the bumpers, or platforms, between the cars or seized hold of the iron rods that ran beneath them. If he chose to “ride the rods,” as the “profeshes,” or seasoned rail riders, put it, he would have made his way into a wheel truck, positioned inches from both the whizzing wheel alongside and the gravel and ties beneath. If he chose the bumpers, he would probably next have climbed to the “deck,” or roof, of a car. Then, with the train traveling 50 miles per hour, he would either have “held her down” or crawled from deck to deck until securing a place on a “blind,” the prized position at the end of a baggage or mail car. Such spots were blind because there were no doors leading out to them, and so they were relatively safe from the “shacks,” or brakemen, who might try to evict a vagrant passenger from the moving train.

All of these techniques belonged to a growing repertoire of road skills that London would use to make his way across North America and back with hardly a dollar in his pocket. It was an outsized adventure, an exaggerated version of the unemployed migrations made by millions of boys, men, and a few women during the economic depression of the 1890s. “You can starve at home, or you can starve on the road,” was a common aphorism of the time, and many, like London, chose to take their chances riding the rails. In so doing, these wayfarers forged a floating subculture that was both a product of the new urban-industrial order coming into being and a challenge to it.

For London, the journey was born of equal parts desperation and fascination. “I went on ‘The Road,’” he later wrote, “because I couldn’t keep away from it; because I hadn’t the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn’t work all my life on ‘one same shift’; because—well, just because it was easier to than not to.” London kept his distance from the down-and-out “stiffs” he saw on the road and imagined himself rather as a latter-day Huck Finn lighting “out for the territory ahead of the rest” (Twain’s novel had been published in 1884). He kept a diary of his journey, jotting down the slang, characters, and local color he encountered along the way. The best stories that he eventually told of his hoboing days can be found in The Road, a collection of nine essays written more than a dozen years later.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London’s The Road (1907) uses a picaresque narrative centered on the travels of a roguish hero to achieve a critical distance from the mainstream culture. For London the writer, the road (and the rail) offers a vantage point from which to survey the pretensions, the hypocritical morality, the stultifying manners, and the reflexive violence of the propertied classes. Viewing the dominant culture from the bottom up and the outside in, London satirizes such refinements as eggcups and Melba toast and exposes judicial graft and police brutality. From the perspective of the boxcar, the courthouses and parlors of the respectable appear deviant, while the hobo emerges as a self-reliant and full-blooded refugee from the despoiled social order.

It is no wonder that Jack London proved popular with working-class readers, including generations of literate hoboes. But The Road, serialized first in Cosmopolitan magazine, was marketed primarily to middle-class urbanites who were upwardly mobile and safely ensconced in professional, managerial, or clerical careers. Their fascination with the hobo world (“hobohemia,” Sinclair Lewis called it), which London was one of the first writers to exploit fully, betokened white-collar dreams of escape and rebellion, dreams that a new breed of mass-market publishers systematically fed. London’s virile tales of the road relieved the ennui of corporate pencil pushers. At the same time, his “profesh” persona in The Road displayed the resilience, hustle, and fluid character that the emerging consumer culture would celebrate and reward.

Aware of the ironies implicit in the hobo as cultural hero, Jack London never quite resolved what the road meant for him or for a nation that was rapidly shedding its customary sources of identity. When he returned to Oakland in the early fall of 1894, he made two vows that foreshadowed the contradictions of his storied career: to escape poverty by writing for the mass market (at this he would succeed, becoming the first writer to earn a million dollars for his work) and to agitate for a socialist revolution.

Joining the army of pencil pushers himself, London harnessed the guile and grit he exhibited on the road to satisfy the new middle-class enchantment with all things wild and uncivilized. But The Road is more than a nostalgic series of adventure stories; it is a stand in a middle-class culture at war with itself. In The Road, London makes generous use of subcultural slang, which he translates clearly within the text, providing readers with a new insider language (punk, bum, ditch, nerve, handout). As if to compensate for his strivings as a “vendor of brains” (London’s term for his trade), he embraces collective emancipation for his class, a vision of authentic community and an integrated self that he spent his whole life pursuing.

The road was part of this pursuit, and the extent to which Americans followed London down the hobo path, either as riders or as readers, gives measure of the crisis that attended the nation’s rise to industrial supremacy.

Todd DePastino is the author of Citizen Hobo: How A Century Of Homelessness Shaped America (2003). His essay is from the introduction to a new edition of The Road by Jack London. Copyright © 2006 by Rutgers, The State University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.

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