davidwright 's review for:

The Road by Jack London

4.0

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I’ve enjoyed several other hobo accounts (such as Jim Tully's great Beggars of Life), and don’t know how this had escaped my notice for so long, but I enjoyed it so much I think it may kick off a Jack London binge for me. In these real-life adventures drawn from his tramping days during the depression years of the 1890s, London shares with the reader the fine art of lying and begging for food, the vicious skill of holding one’s own amidst the rough handling of wolfish road kids and predatory professional hobos, and the colorful language and customs of life [b:on the road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573]. Throughout, London depicts himself as a romantic adventurer and protean trickster, but there is another journey underway here as well. He records a lesser-known historical chapter in which he joined an army of jobless tramps in a march on Washington D.C. to demand of a sort of proto-Public Works Administration – an experience that clearly had a big influence on London’s own Socialist views. London comes of age, maturing from a wayward adventure-seeker continually on-the-make and looking out only for his own interests to someone with a wider view of the world’s unfortunates and a social conscience. These views are reinforced by London’s experiences behind bars in a powerful passage that pre-figures Alexander Berkman’s great Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. I hugely enjoyed this account, as I suspected I would when I chose this title to be the first full-length work to read on my Sony Reader. Not bad, and now I have several other London works in the public domain downloaded, including The Star Rover, which a number of ex-cons have recommended to me over the years.