Tramp Lit

The combined events of the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the first transcontinental railroad opening in 1869, and the financial crash of 1873, found large numbers-including thousands of former soldiers well used to an outdoor life and tramping-thrown into a transient life and forced to roam the continent, surviving on whatever resources came to hand. For most, the life of the hobo was born out of necessity. For a few it became a lifestyle choice. Some of the latter group committed their adventures to print, both autobiographical and fictional, and together with their British and Irish counterparts, whose wanderlust was fueled by an altogether different genesis, they account for the fifteen tramp writers whose stories and ideas are the subject of this book. The lives of some, like Jack Everson, Jack Black and Tom Kromer, are told in a single volume, others, like Morley Roberts and Stephen Graham, have eighty and fifty published works to their credit respectively. Some remain completely unknown and their books are long since out of print, others, like Trader Horn and Jim Tully, were Hollywood celebrities. Others yet, such as Black, Tulley, Horn, Bart Kennedy, Leon Ray Livingstone, and Jack London, had their stories immortalized in film.

A discovery in Feral House's Tramp Lit Series, Bart Kennedy's 1908 A Tramp's Philosophy is Kennedy's late work distilling his life and experiences into a concept for living. He includes insights on everything from religion to civilization to crime to the lure of the open roads.

Jim Christy's life and adventures began on the mobbed-up streets of South Philadelphia. Over his 73 years to date, Christy has asserted his freedom of spirit as a vagabond adventurer, latter-day hobo, journalist, private eye, actor, musician, and artist, in over 50 countries around the globe, and still found time to write over 30 books. His early adventures as a street fighter and child tramp provide a unique socio-cultural history of Philadelphia in the 50's and 60's before the book moves on to recount his later exploits from some of the most remote and random corners of the world.

Ladies' man. Child soldier. War hero. Egotist. Tramp. Drunkard. Published author. Each of these descriptions captures some part of William 'Roving Bill' Aspinwall's life, and yet none does him justice. Born one of 23 siblings, married 5 times, wounded fighting for the Union in one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, kicked out of numerous jobs and solders' homes for drunkenness, and having spent decades wandering as penniless vagabond, Bill also kept up a 24-year correspondence with John James McCook, Professor of Modern Languages at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In so doing Bill provided the earliest and best account of life on the road by an American hobo. Written between 1893 and 1917, Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America tells Bill's story entirely in his own words. Describing experiences on the road, the people he meets, his dalliances with women and his memories of the Civil War, the letters are a rich and unique correspondence. Having been physically and mentally scarred at the 1843 Battle of Champion Hill, Bill details his lifelong battle with booze. He also gives first-hand accounts of men thrown out of work during the economic Panic of 1893, of wandering around the country as an itinerant umbrella-mender, of working in factories, farms and even a circus, as well as his visit to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903. Bill's words are the real voice of a nineteenth-century hobo.

Kathleen Phelan (nee Newton) was utterly unique; a female vagabond who embraced the freedom of the tramp lifestyle and philosophy. Like the infamous women explorers of the Victorian era, she traveled before as a single woman adventuring to every place on the planet funding her travels through canny bets on horseracing. At age 26 in 1944, she met and married author and fellow tramp, Jim Phelan who introduced her to his literary circle. She tramped another 40+ years after he passed roaming from continent to continent, staying with Picasso in Spain, playing football with Pele in Brazil, and even telling her stories to the Shah of Iran. Her magnetism attracted friends all over the world with whom she corresponded and kept entertained with lively letters. We meet Kathleen here in her never before published memoir of her travels with husband Jim and her return to the road after his passing in 1966. Also included are personal correspondence and magazine articles written by Kathleen while on the road. Her nephew Liam Phelan, a senior journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, writes a moving and personal introduction.

What is it about the desolate far North American wilderness that calls the intrepid traveler to uncover its sanctifying and deadly secrets? From Jack London (Call of the Wild) to Christopher McCandless (chronicled in Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild) souls have found solace in the silent, frozen northern kingdom at the top of the world, the Ultima Thule. The forested flatlands give way to the frozen Rocky Mountains over millions of acres nominally in the dominion of both the United States and Canada and accessible by its 1532 mile shared umbilical cord-The Alcan Highway. Legendary vagabond, Jim Christy, a Canadian now but born an American travels this road throughout his life. First as a young man in the early 1960s hungry for rugged adventure then revisiting the journey every few years both observing and reflecting on the growth of Northwest in the Rough Road to the North. Christy vividly describes the history of the indigenous people and the hearty (and often foolhardy) pioneers who built the Alcan highway and opened the northern road. Christy's lyrical text weaves fulsome magic about the siren call of the last unconquered land of North America. The forested flatlands give way to the frozen Rocky Mountains over millions of acres nominally in the dominion of both the United States and Canada and accessible by its 1532 mile shared umbilical cord-The Alcan Highway. Legendary vagabond, Jim Christy, a Canadian now but born an American travels this road throughout his life. First as a young man in the early 1960s hungry for rugged adventure then revisiting the journey every few years both observing and reflecting on the growth of Northwest in the Rough Road to the North.