Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
On the Bum
By Luc Sante
You Can't Win: The Autobiography of Jack Black
foreword by William S. Burroughs
Amok Press, 394 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Boxcar Bertha: An Autobiography
as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman, introduction by Kathy Acker, afterword by Roger A. Bruns
Amok Press, 285 pp., $7.95 (paper)
When the great westward push of settlement in the United States was finally completed, a process that occurred roughly between 1890 and 1920, it left in its wake a large number of people who couldn't stop moving. They were cow-boys, miners, loggers, scouts—itinerant workers who had spent their lives migrating toward the next frontier. When there were no frontiers left to breach, they found themselves constitutionally incapable of settling into town or farm life, and so they became hoboes, ceaselessly crisscrossing the country by freight train, taking work along the way. They were joined by a host of others who had any number of reasons for avoiding the constraints of a fixed residence, and these mostly became tramps: adventurers, thrill-seekers, petty criminals, drug addicts, confidence men, itinerant gamblers, anarchists, Wobblies, remnants of various communal experiments, victims of different sorts of discrimination (blacks, homosexuals, Germans during World War I, Russians after 1917), victims of primogeniture, sons cast out by fathers, runaway husbands, runaway wives, debtors, pariahs. In hard times the ranks would be swelled by the unemployed, for whom vagrancy was a temporary condition.
Review, 3802 words
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