Chapter Four examines accounts of female transiency from the early twentieth century. Analysing writings by and about Dolly Kennedy Yancy, Agnes Thecla Fair, Kittie Solomon and Barbara Starke (whose real name was Helen Card), the chapter argues that female transient writing provides a different focus to representations of transient women written by men. When they do write about women, male writers obsess about sex: presenting the road as a place of moral danger or a space of fantastical sexual liberation. Female authors, on the other hand, treat sex as merely one aspect, and often an annoying one, of the transient experience. Yancy, Fair, Solomon and Starke focus on the liberatory aspects of moving beyond domestic confinement that transiency can offer to women in the early twentieth century. Yancy and Solomon discuss sex rarely. Fair and Starke both discuss incidents of sexual assault or harassment. Stake in particular represents male sexual harassment as a constant background noise to the female transient experience.

Transients created what was arguably the first counterculture in the modern United States, known as ‘hobohemia’. This Introduction argues that hobohemia was a literary subculture, the fruits of which included fiction, poetry, autobiography, sociology, journalism, and popular music, including works produced by women and African-Americans. The material examined by this book, much of which has been forgotten or neglected, demonstrates that hobos were not the all-American, white, straight, male hyper-individualists that they have been seen as by much twentieth-century popular history. As well as laying out the argument and structure of the book, the Introduction argues that Hobohemia was a subculture that privileged storytelling, and that the popular genre of hobo memoir emphasises drift as a key aspect of the transient experience.

Chapter Five turns to the figure of the hobo as constructed by Nels Anderson, a former hobo who became a member of the influential ‘Chicago School’ of sociology. It argues that Anderson’s early writing, in particular The Hobo (1923) and The Milk and Honey Route (1931), projects the hobo as a distinctively American figure, separate from the supposedly European tramp because of his commitment to hard work. I argue that The Milk and Honey Route is crucial to understanding Anderson’s The Hobo. Both books contain a distinctive double voice that not only speaks to their author’s position as a hobo-turned sociologist, but also expresses scepticism towards the project of sociology itself. In making this latter argument, the chapter pays attention to Anderson’s tone and language. Making use of literary close reading, I argue that his early style is distinguished by a voice that mixes different modes, including the sociological and autobiographical, in conflicting and paradoxical ways. While earlier scholars have noted Anderson’s ambiguous representation of hobos, this chapter demonstrates that he was equally ambiguous about the sociologists who studied them.

Chapter Three compares the representation of vulnerable transient youth in the work of Leon Ray Livingston, whose road name was ‘A-No.1’, and the author Jack London. The chapter argues that both writers engage with the frequent abuse and exploitation of young boys, known as ‘punks’ or ‘gay-cats’, on the road. A-No.1’s semi-autobiographical writings are more explicit, obsessively reproducing the same narrative in which the author (or his fictional stand-in) saves a punk from the clutches of an older hobo, or ‘jocker’. For London, who was at the very least what today would be called bi-curious, the questions of transient sexuality and abuse were more fraught. He acknowledges the existence of sexually-vulnerable youths in early stories, written before he became a successful author. However, in his well-known work The Road (1907) he goes to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was never a gay-cat. The text positions London as a young man well ahead of his time, a claim that many critics have taken at face value. Yet paradoxically the text’s narrator seeks out the approval and protection of older men, including one who seems to expect sexual favours in return.

Focussing on writing by Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriweather, Harry Franck, Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay, Chapter Two charts the development of a subgenre of writing that combines the slumming narrative with the travelogue, which I call the ‘vagabond travel narrative’. In this subset of travel literature, a narrator attempts to sightsee without money. These narratives make a spectacle of the supposed ingenuity of the narrator in acquiring, in the absence of financial capital, what I call ‘experiential capital’. Yet these texts also reveal, against the intentions of their authors, that it is their privilege as white men that enables these journeys and experiences. Vagabond writers set themselves apart from hobos and tourists, seeing both groups as too closely associated with modernity. Unlike the hobo, the vagabond travels to escape modernity – to go ‘off road’, rather than ‘on the road’, we might say. Yet Vachel Lindsay in particular shows an uneasy solidarity with the transient workers whom he inevitably encounters.

In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.

The Conclusion begins by showing that the hobo was a picturesque archetype that was portrayed as being on the verge of extinction from its very inception. When the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ actually came to an end following the conclusion of World War 2, however, the popular image of transiency shifted to the automobile, which had been providing its own road narratives for several decades but which found its popular spokesperson in the figure of Jack Kerouac, whose writing combined the spiritual literary vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo. The Conclusion briefly traces the representation of transiency in the wake of On the Road, including the development of the ‘road movie’ and the way in which numerous singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the mantle of the countercultural drifter. I outline the growth of homelessness, voluntary ‘lifestyle’ transiency and the development of the relatively privileged ‘digital nomad’ in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a discussion of the use of train-hopping by people fleeing to Europe and the US to escape poverty, violence and climate change.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.

Chapter Six focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish-American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In hisnewspaper columns and songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. He parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience.