The Road by Jack London
It took me a couple of tries to get the correct pic
for this post from the internet. Google
Search, after all, is built to go after the hottest connection to the key words
given to it. The words ‘Road’ and ‘Jack’
kept finding ‘On the Road by Jack Kerouac’, the 1950’s best selling book that
turned the world on to not just beatniks but James Dean and antiauthority-disestablishmentarianism
that would soon rock the sixties.
Kerouac’s book has got cars roaring through the
night carrying wild youth across America. London’s has decidedly wilder and
more determined youth of all ages riding the couplers on railroad freight cars
at 40 miles an hour and up, in all weathers.
Yes, the same author who gave us poems, plays,
nonfiction, ‘Call of the Wild’ and ‘Sea Wolf’ also gave us this auto-biography
of a… well, let a Wikipedia author tell it better than I can:
The Road is an autobiographical memoir by Jack London, first published in 1907. It is London's account
of his experiences as a hobo in the 1890s, during the worst economic
depression the United States had experienced up to that
time.[1] He describes his experiences hopping freight trains,
"holding down" a train when the crew is trying to throw him off,
begging for food and money, and making up extraordinary stories to fool the
police. He also tells of the thirty days that he spent in the Erie County Penitentiary, which he described as a place of "unprintable
horrors," after being "pinched" (arrested) for vagrancy. In
addition, he recounts his time with Kelly's Army, which he joined up with in Wyoming and remained with until its dissolution at the Mississippi River.[2]
I couldn’t wait to read each next chapter, though at
times I had to. This is one of the several books that stirred my heart to ever
live on the road myself. Though living
the way Jack London did, on the road he chose?
Not for me!
But
the book is! *****
-Ken
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