PROLOGUE

By the time Jim Christy had read Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, at the age of seventeen—discovering in that defining moment both his tribe and his love of literature—Christy was already an experienced road kid. He had embarked on several lone adventures including, just prior to his thirteenth birthday, a ten-week tramp from his home in South Philadelphia to the Canadian border and back. Such early impulses were the result of a certain malady common to all tramps-of-choice (as distinct from tramps-of-necessity) the world over, a human condition frequently referred to as wanderlust: an involuntary lure of the alien and the exotic that could be regarded as the reverse of homesickness—Christy was sick at heart to see the world.

On the Road may have been an affirmation to Christy of his own strange and unconventional yearnings, but he did not need a mentor in the art of vagabondage. Christy had always been an individual, refusing to embrace convention for the sake of fitting in, choosing instead the freedom to define his own identity. This individualism was also accompanied by cosmopolitan instincts, a sovereignty of spirit that left Christy feeling alien everywhere but claiming everywhere as his home. But in spite of a flirtation with anarchism in which Christy read widely on the subject, including Emma Goldman’s Living My Life three times, this rebel against modern life had no interest in changing the world or creating Utopias. His was a private, not a public, protest, an escape from the burden and banality of mainstream society’s expectations and obligations.

In this sense, tramping or vagabondage (from the Latin vagari, to wander), is no more than a personal strategy for survival in a hostile world created by certain other humans. But Christy has always been in good company, attracted to other fugitives and self-exiles from tedious uniformity: hobos, vagabond artists and musicians, conscientious objectors, carnival freaks, rogues, and reprobates from all layers of society. A poem by Christy published in 2013 shows that his own feelings of alienation from the human world had very early beginnings indeed. Ready or Not reflects the same sentiments as those of one of Samuel Beckett’s fictional tramps in The Unnamable when, at the point of leaving his mother’s womb he announces, I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth into death. Christy’s contribution is as follows:

READY OR NOT

No, no! Stop!

Mama, Mama, please don’t

Scream. Stop pushing, relax.

Eat ice cream. Nibble a pickle.

Get even fatter. I like it like

That. Like this. My current

Residence; it’s perfect. Couldn’t

Be beat. Plenty to eat here. Warm.

No worries. No job. No teachers.

No unemployment lines. No

Rejection letters or fist fights

In alleys at the back of bars.

No angry lovers, no bad music.

I’ve even gotten used to Father’s

Weekly thrusts. So, mama, please

Please get up from the Joe Weider

Incline Bench, your birthing chair

Of choice. Birth me not, Mama

Stop that pushing this instant.

No more of that screaming. I wish

To stay right here

In a cozy ball.

Can’t you understand that,

Mama?

Shit.

Here we go.

And oh, it’s cold.

And our screams are one,

Mama.

(Jim Christy, This Cockeyed World)¹

But Christy’s real forebears were those tramp-writers born during the late 1800s who influenced Kerouac in the first place. In this respect, the writing and the life of Jim Christy, born James Christinzio on July 14, 1945, presents us with the conundrum of a Victorian vagabond adventurer born seventy years too late. Christy even missed out on participating in the world described in Kerouac’s writings that first identified to the young hobo he was not unique in his unconventional response to the world. And so, within the wider classification of societal misfits, Christy may well be one of the last representatives of that rare and much overlooked tradition, the tramp or vagabond writer.

It is understandable that during the financial crashes and associated depressions of 1873, 1893, and 1930, armies of tramps-of-necessity took to the road out of desperation to find work or simply survive. However, during this same period, a small but significant number of individuals deliberately exiled themselves from mainstream society simply out of a lifestyle choice. At a time when many of us are again questioning whether the acquisition of material possessions give our lives any real meaning, there is much we can learn from the spirit of these tramp-writers about surviving in the world today. One of the underlying questions posed by the life choices of Christy and his predecessors is: What possessed adults and teenagers, many from comfortable, even middle-class, homes, not only to abandon their families and communities for a life on the road in the first place, but also to commit their adventures and philosophy to print? When a friend of Christy’s, Daniel Zeleniouk, recently asked him, Jim, how’d you get interested in books and writing? he got the now predictable answer, "Well, I didn’t read much until I was in my late teens when I picked up a book called On the Road." When pressed on the subject, Christy does recall starting to write a short story about baseball when he was thirteen, but was sixteen before a version of it got published in a weekly newspaper, together with a macabre dog story that he wrote about the same time. A few days later, the following arrived in an email—that’s how it goes with Jim Christy:

I woke today thinking of your question about what started me writing. I guess it was the early traveling, and when I learned that others had written about their travels, I thought I might try my hand at it. Had those first attempts been a whole lot better, they might be considered terrible! I didn’t come up with anything decent until I began writing those early political screeds, polemics, and harangues. Most so-called adventure writing has always bored me. Road tales, too. They’re too relentless, have too much what I would call, upholstery. Predictable. Read London’s The Road, then Kerouac’s On the Road. The former isn’t even in it. The thing with Kerouac is the spirit and attitude with which he approached his trips. He may not have ventured far and wide but he did it with an adventurous attitude. Which reminds me that my least favourite genre is modern travel writing.²

As essential as getting an appetite for writing, Christy’s introduction to On the Road also turned him into a voracious reader. Not that he didn’t already have advanced skills in that department. Christy had, in fact, been a compulsive reader from a young age without, it seems, ever having being taught—even if that reading material was confined to hot-rod magazines. He was later told that at the age of eight (third grade) he was reading at the level of a second-year university student. How he came by this information is more bizarre than the fact itself. One afternoon, aged around nine or ten, he was called to the school office where he was surprised to see his parents. He was informed that he had been picked, among several other hapless kids from across the city’s schools, to participate in a long-term research project at the University of Pennsylvania to identify why some kids are good readers and others not. About ten from each category were picked, and although Christy had no recollection at the time which grouping he was supposed to represent, he surmises with hindsight that it must have been the bright kids. He was matched with a kid from the other group who could not read a line. The pairs were also matched by age, socio-economic, and racial background, but he never got to meet his counterpart or even know their name. Christy was informed it was a big honor to be part of the study and remembers it all being very hush-hush. Over the six or seven years that he continued to be involved, and between his many tramping adventures, Christy spent countless hours in the company of a string of psychiatrists, sociologists, and psychologists:

…a bunch of men in lab coats and sports jackets. Some of them scribbled madly, others fixed you with stares. I can remember thinking how ridiculous and obvious were these latter. But the whole deal was that you were supposed to be cut off and on your own, just the kid and the adult.³

At the conclusion of the study, aged either eighteen or twenty-one (Christy forgets which), there was supposed to be a big gathering with dinner, a party, and grand speeches. But after putting up with it until he was about fifteen or sixteen, the whole thing became a tedious ordeal and Christy quit, no longer prepared to give up his Saturdays traveling to the university.

But to return to Christy the adult reader, as he discusses above, this newfound love of literature clearly influenced his early polemical writings following his arrival in Canada, not to mention his personal philosophy articulated in his second book Beyond the Spectacle (1973). Spectacle will be discussed further in the epilogue of this book. But in an essay Christy wrote for Canada’s Globe and Mail in 2002, titled Looking for literature in all the wrong places, we are provided with a characterization of Christy the tramp reader, as distinct from the tramp-writer. When Christy’s literary friends went traveling, they did so weighed down with enough reading material to last the entire trip. Not so Christy, even though he was never without a volume in his pocket. For the purposes of tramping hobo-style, he says, it is … necessary to travel light. Yet it is also necessary for me to have my daily reading fix. Christy maintains that packing enough reading material is not only an encumbrance to tramping, it also means missing out on the thrill of the search. I have never started out on any trip with more than two books, yet neither has he ever wanted for reading material. Christy never failed to find all of the reading material he required to feed his appetite in the most remote corners of the world—further fueling the imagination as to how certain English-language books ended up in the places they did in the first place: Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley from the shelf of a tailor’s shop in Addis Ababa; an Ernest Haycox novel in Belgrade; Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Wisdom in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala; the complete works of Alexander Trochi and of Edward Beck in Florence; Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History from a pub in Nuuk, Greenland; and from Puerto Escondido in Mexico, Kevin Baker’s novel Dreamland about the early days of Coney Island, Suits Me, the biography of the transgender musician and bandleader Billy Tipton, and Bonnie Bowman’s Skin. In Mexican beach towns, the best places to find books, for reasons I can’t fathom, are boutiques for women, which included picking up in various such locations all five novels by the Greek-American lounge singer Eddie Constantine. The added benefit of acquiring one’s reading material in such an arbitrary manner is discovering reading material that would otherwise have eluded him entirely. One lives in hope, despite past experience, of great and exotic reading discoveries to come. Maybe a Francis Carco novel in Ho Chi Minh City.⁴

But literature and tramping were not the only influences on Christy’s writing. From an early age Christy was mesmerized by the movies and acknowledges that film was an important and certainly earlier influence on his life than books. He remembers his mother taking him to the Italia Theater when they lived on Catherine Street, South Philadelphia, to watch Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster in The Rose Tattoo. Later he would regularly spend all day Saturdays at the Colonial Theater watching film noir and westerns, his favorite genres. But more of movies and Christy’s own sometime career in the film industry later.

As for why Christy took to the road in the first place, this is a theme that will be returned to time and again in this book. The theme of wanderlust will also be revisited in the epilogue. But in order to better appreciate the more recent lineage of the tramp-writer, a genus of which Jim Christy is a latter-day representative, it is important to summarize here the life and times of some of these earlier proponents of the art. Indeed, as will be revealed at the end of this prologue, it was while researching these other literary vagabonds for an entirely separate project that the author accidentally stumbled across Jim Christy in the first place.

Though many of these earlier tramp-writers achieved some degree of critical acclaim during the Victorian/Edwardian period in which they were published, today they remain largely forgotten. One of the aims of this book, through the life and adventures of a modern-day vagabond, is to revive an interest not only in the life and writings of Christy himself, but of the other authors who contributed to this much neglected genre. Jim Christy shares most of the traits and characteristics common to the tramp-writers listed below: a thirst for adventure and the exotic; a refusal to identify with any tribe yet feeling at home everywhere (cosmopolitanism); physical strength and endurance, the ability to survive hostile circumstances—including starvation, hard labor, beatings, and jail; intelligence and philosophic wisdom; freedom from the tyranny of possessions; a rejection of man-made borders, laws and customs which are seen as artificial; freedom also from the restrictions and responsibilities imposed by rules, regulations, and responsibility to family and friends; the ability to enjoy relationships without being bound by them; a lifestyle that embraces the seductions of the natural world—living in communion with nature; and the ability to live in the present, taking pleasures now, not deferring them for later—whether for a pension or the promise of heaven. These characteristics can be traced all the way back to the philosophy of the ancient Greek Cynics,⁵ of which Christy must also be counted a modern-day representative. For some of the tramp-writers discussed below, we can further add a taste for alcohol, experience as a sailor, frequent visits to jail on vagrancy and other trumped-up charges, and prowess in the pugilistic arts—the latter applying to Flynt, Black, Everson, Davies, Kennedy, Horn, Tully, and Phelan, as well as Christy himself, and also others not discussed here such as Al Kaufman and Louis L’Amour.

The principal characteristic to remember here is that these tramp-writers were, first and foremost, individuals, even if they shared a similar lifestyle and philosophy of the world. The writing and ideas of those listed in the mini-biographies that follow (presented in order of birth) will be more fully discussed in the epilogue of this book, alongside a review of Jim Christy’s own philosophy.

London-born Morley Roberts (1857–1942) was one of the most prolific tramp-writers with over eighty published novels, plays, essays, biography, and verse to his credit. Yet apart from Roberts’ biography of his close friend and fellow novelist George Gissing—thinly disguised as fiction in the The Private Life of Henry Maitland—Roberts’ work is sadly even more obscure today than Gissing’s. Like most of the other tramp-writers discussed here, Roberts experienced feelings of wanderlust from an early age, yet it was not until eighteen that he dropped out of the university to enroll as a steerage passenger on a sailing ship bound for Melbourne. After three years tramping Australia, followed by a short spell as a civil servant at the War Office in London, Roberts bought himself a passage to America, initially heading for Texas, then working his way to Chicago on a cattle train. After returning to Texas (from where he adopted the hobo moniker Texas Charlie), Roberts set off for Iowa, St. Paul, and then north across the Canadian border to Winnipeg, tramping west through the Rockies on foot to Vancouver. From there he walked most of the way back across the American border to Washington, then on to San Francisco arriving penniless in 1885. After further tramping adventures including Spain, Portugal, and the South African veldt, Roberts would embark on a round-the-world trip that included a sojourn at Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific island home of Opolu, spending several hours with that writer. Stevenson died later the same year.

Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) published twenty-one books and a weekly magazine, Bart’s Broadsheet. Born in Leeds of Irish parents, Kennedy lived and worked in Manchester factories from the age of six and did not take up tramping until the age of twenty. He arrived in Liverpool with one shilling and worked his passage to America, arriving in Philadelphia without a penny in his pocket. Kennedy describes tramping the streets in a state of elation at the prospect of having a whole new world before him. After walking to Baltimore, surviving on his skills as a boxer en route, Kennedy signed on to work as an oyster dredger for fifteen dollars a month. His tramping career may well have ended here, being washed overboard from a steamer in a hurricane and having his yawl surrounded by ice in the Chesapeake Bay. But Kennedy would survive to have many other adventures, including drilling and dynamiting in mines, being jailed for vagrancy in New Orleans, a failed suicide attempt alone in the Rocky Mountains, hand-to-hand combat with hostile Native Americans, touring the U.S. Pacific coastline as a bass singer in an opera company, and a memorable tramp through Spain. The New York Times obituary of Kennedy describes him as the tramp novelist … pioneer of the staccato method of short story writing, and The Times [UK] obituary describes his writing as written with vigour, but in a curious jerky style.

The adventures of Alfred Aloysius Smith (1861–1931), aliases Trader Horn and Zambezi Jack, began when he was expelled from school at the age of sixteen for being an untamed and troublesome boy. Horn’s behavior was a result of that same sickness of the heart to see the world described above. And so, after turning seventeen, Horn signed an apprenticeship with the Liverpool firm Hatton and Cookson to work for that company in equatorial West Africa’s ivory and rubber trade, taking free board and passage on the SS Angola. The fantastic adventures that followed, including his search for the white goddess and battles with river pirates, are the subject of Horn’s first book Trader Horn: A Young Man’s Outstanding Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1927). Further adventures included a spell in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and time as a hobo in the U.S., as well as participating in piracy off the East African coast. The first of Horn’s trilogies was co-written with the help of South African writer Ethelreda Lewis, whom he met in his late sixties peddling kitchenwares at the writer’s home. Their ensuing friendship saved him from starving to death in a Johannesburg dosshouse. A Hollywood movie and celebrity followed, so no need to recount Horn’s adventures further. What Christy shares with Horn, less apparent with some of the other tramp-writers, is his appetite for the more exotic adventures recounted in Chapter 7, such as In Search of the Golden Madonna, A Month in a Cartagena Dungeon, and On the Caddy Trail.

Josiah Flynt (1869–1907) published fourteen books and essays in a short life ended prematurely by his addiction to alcohol and narcotics. Fatherless from a young age, Flynt was brought up by his mother in Evanston, Illinois. A closeness to his mother throughout his life mitigated the worst excesses of tramping, and was responsible for Flynt graduating from the University of Berlin. His first tramping expedition and earliest time in jail occurred at the age of five, the first of many such adventures that even whippings from his father and pleas from his mother failed to prevent. Flynt’s writings are some of the most frequently quoted first-hand accounts of hobo life and culture, some of which influenced the more celebrated tramp-writer, Jack London. Flynt made the following distinction between the vagrant and the wanderlust vagabond: He is free from the majority of passions common among vagrants, yet he is the most earnest vagrant of all. To reform him it is necessary to kill his personality, to take away his main ambition. And this is a task almost superhuman.⁶ Flynt has been described as a gifted actor, as comfortable and at ease with the tramping and criminal classes as he was with philosophers, politicians, and others notable in public life. Among those Flynt spent time with on his travels were Ibsen, George Augustus, Horatio Brown, Tolstoy (as a guest at his farm), and the Apache chief Geronimo. A friend and fellow writer of Flynt’s, Emily Burbank, provides a description of Flynt that applies equally to the other tramp-writers discussed here: it must be remembered that Flynt was the tramp writing, not the literary man tramping.

As well as his hobo credentials, Jack Black (1871–1932) was also a professional criminal, or yegg, a term applied to the generally more feared outlaw hobos—as opposed to those who survived simply by begging and casual labor. Black’s principal criminal activities involved burglaries, armed hold-ups, and safe-cracking, but like Flynt and London, Black was also addicted at various times to narcotics—in his case combined with the thrill of gambling. Born near Vancouver, British Columbia, but raised in Missouri, Black’s adventures and philosophy are contained in a single volume, You Can’t Win (1926), published six years before his death. Black’s autobiography is also the subject of a 2016 movie of the same name, starring, co-produced, and co-written by Michael Pitt. As with Flynt and London, Black’s writing had a major influence on the Beat movement and its writers, particularly William Burroughs, who in his first book, Junkie (1953), reflected much of the style and subject matter of You Can’t Win. As with Jim Phelan’s (see below) writings on penology, You Can’t Win is also an important social history on many aspects of criminality and prison life during the particular period covered. One important distinction is that Phelan spent thirteen continuous years behind bars for a murder he did not commit; Black on the other hand was the habitual criminal, constantly in and out of jail, with a total incarceration time of about fifteen years including several prison breakouts. Black was a reformed character by the time he wrote his book and part of his motivation for writing it was to dissuade would-be criminals from a life of crime, at the same time pointing out the inability of the courts and judiciary to deliver justice. During his writing period Black was also involved in journalism, writing essays, and participating in lecture tours. It is thought that he drowned himself in 1932 after telling friends that if life got too much for him he would row out into New York Harbor and drop overboard with weights tied to his feet. In his darker moments Black described this state of mind as being ready for the river.

William Henry Davies (1871–1940), distant cousin of the English stage actor Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905), preferred to be known as a poet, the most memorable fragment of his poems being the opening two lines of Leisure: What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare… But it is for his prose memoirs of twelve years tramping in the Americas and Britain, recorded in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), that he is best known. Davies was a complex character, neither entirely at one with other tramps, being too bookish, nor comfortable in the literary world of London, having arrived in that company as something of a social oddity. Not to mention the fact that he only had one foot; he lost the other after a failed attempt to jump a train in Renfrew, Canada, on his way to join the Klondike gold rush. Davies credited his taste for alcohol with being raised in a pub in Newport, South Wales, and given porter to drink at bedtime, in lieu of cocoa or tea, as is the custom in more domestic houses. Davies’ adventures are rich and entertaining, alternating between paid work, begging, and tramping. Like many of the other tramp-writers discussed here, including Christy himself, Davies recalls near-death experiences, such as the time he lay semi-conscious with malarial fever in a Mississippi swamp, surrounded by wild dogs and vultures waiting their chance to make a meal of him. As with Christy also, Davies frequently had to resort to his skills as a boxer to protect himself from being robbed or otherwise abused.

Leon Ray Livingston (1872–1944), unlike most of the other tramp-writers listed here who celebrated their anonymity and life in the margins of society with no thought of competing against fellow vagabonds for publicity, seems to have openly courted celebrity. He unashamedly promoted himself as is evident from the covers of his twelve self-published books, where he introduced himself as America’s Most Famous Tramp who traveled 500,000 miles on $7.61 (from which he adopted the moniker A-No.1) and crowned himself King of the Hoboes. Yet Livingston’s achievements as a child tramp from the age of eleven were second to none. Born into a well-to-do family in San Francisco, to a French father and German mother, Livingston claims that by the age of eight he could speak both these languages fluently, to which he later added Spanish. At the age of eleven he was sent home for bad behavior with a note from his teacher requiring his father’s signature, but Livingston ran away rather than face disgrace. So started another hobo career. He took a river steamboat from San Francisco Harbor to Sacramento then walked to a water stop along a railway track where he rode a freight to Truckee, eventually expelled from the train by a brakeman at Winnemucca in the Nevada desert. From there he beat his way to Chicago while hidden among sheep in a stock car, then struck out for New Orleans. From there he took a job as a cabin boy on board a British schooner plying trade among the ports of Central America. He jumped ship in Belize, and from there to Guatemala, onwards to Mexico and home. But only ninety-seven miles from his destination, and still only twelve years old, Livingston paired up with another hobo and continued his tramping adventures.

Livingston’s second tramp to Latin America was an extraordinary affair. First he beat it by rail to San Luis Potosí in central Mexico from where he set off for the port of Vera Cruz. There he secured passage as a cabin boy on a German schooner bound for Venezuela, to the port of La Guaira and then on to Maracaibo where he jumped ship to continue his journey to Brazil and the fabled diamond mines. In Maracaibo he met Tom Hanrahan, a boy of his own age from Pennsylvania. By now, well schooled in the art of begging, Livingston soon collected the equivalent of $48. The pair set out together, assisted by the purchase of two donkeys, for Bogotá in Colombia and then onward to Quito in Ecuador. After crossing through the snow and ice of Andean mountain peaks they eventually reached the navigable source of the Amazon tributary, the Rio Napo. Here, having carried them for 1,250 miles, the burros were exchanged for a large ironwood canoe to continue the next 5,000 miles of their tramp by river. After three months they reached the Marañón river in Peru from where they would enter the Madeira River, and then the Amazon proper. But on the night of July 1, 1887, while camping on a slight rise on the confluence of the Amazon with the Rio Negro, tragedy struck. Tom was bitten by a deadly snake and died after ten minutes of convulsions. It took Livingstone a further two months to reach the safety of a mission settlement, and a further nine months recovering in hospital from malaria and starvation before he was well enough to continue his many further adventures. He was still only fifteen years old when Tom died, and eighteen before he returned to America via London after signing on as a crew member on a cattle boat out of Buenos Aires.

Like Flynt, Livingston, London, Tully, Phelan, and of course Christy, Jack Everson (1873–1945) was a child tramp. Aged eleven, and after a particularly vicious beating from his father, Everson resolved to leave home. He jumped a train heading for New York with an older boy. By the age of fourteen, Everson had served his second jail sentence, this time for possession of a stolen Colt .45 revolver which he agreed to peddle for a tramp who failed to tell him the gun had been stolen. At the age of sixteen Everson boarded a ship to work his passage to Australia via Honolulu. He was to serve many other jail sentences including time on a chain gang. His tramping exploits were interspersed with periods of employment including stints as a gold prospector and snake-oil salesman. Everson’s tramping adventures are chronicled in a single volume, The Autobiography of a Tramp, written during the last year of his life, aged seventy-two, and not published until 1992 by his then eighty-six-year-old son. Everson’s adventures should stand alongside the finest writings of the period, both for the richness of the narrative and the sensitivity of the telling. Yet this writer is little known and his work is out of print. Like many other tramps turned writers, Everson’s early childhood was comfortable and middle-class. His mother, Rebecca (Carrie) Jane Billings Everson, was the pioneer inventor of the oil flotation separation process in the mining industry.

Jack London (1876–1916) is one of the better known tramp-writers, not least because of his prolific output including 120 short stories, twenty-six full-length prose works, twenty-two essays, forty-five poems, and six plays. His daughter Joan claims that London’s writing spawned more than forty movies in different languages. London started his career as a fourteen-year-old oyster pirate in and around San Francisco Bay, out-sailing and outsmarting many experienced adults plying the same trade. London did not take to the road and beat trains until he was sixteen under the predictable moniker of Sailor Kid. His hobo initiation, jumping a train with a group of other road kids, ended tragically when one of the gang fell under the train wheels, amputating both his legs. A prolific rambler in these early years, London’s adventures included joining Kelly’s Army, the 1894 march of hobos and unemployed from California to Washington, DC. After the already celebrated Leon Ray Livingstone placed an ad in the Help Wanted column of the Sunday World Magazine stating Wanted—travelmate by hobo contemplating roughing trip to California, he received a reply from an eighteen-year-old Jack London. His book Coast to Coast with Jack London chronicles their adventures from the East Coast to San Francisco, by which time both were severely ill with malaria. After London’s year-long trip to the Klondike in search of gold at the age of twenty-one, and a round-the-world sailing trip that had to be abandoned in Tahiti after he contracted a tropical disease, the rest of his short life was devoted mainly to writing and drinking—the demons of the latter being the subject of his book John Barleycorn. London’s first autobiography, The Road, is one of the most frequently quoted works of tramp literature, inspiring other tramp narratives, not least Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The Road itself was inspired by the earlier writings of Josiah Flynt (seven years older than London) whom London acknowledges in his dedication for the book. Both Flynt and London had a lifetime struggle with drugs and alcohol resulting in their premature deaths—London at forty and Flynt at thirty-eight.

Edinburgh-born Stephen Graham (1884–1975) was a journalist, essayist, novelist, and tramp, a profession which he describes as follows: He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation to the life of his time.⁷ Graham’s adventures and observations are documented in over fifty books and essays, many no longer in print. Graham spoke fluent Russian and many of his books concern his experiences of that pre-revolutionary state, as did his work as a freelance correspondent for The Times, Harpers, and the New Yorker. Based on Graham’s writings, one can only wonder just what a different place Russia was only one hundred years ago. Yet Graham also hiked thousands of miles across America on foot, including large stretches of the Canadian border where he tramped with American poet Vachel Lindsay. As well as covering vast stretches of the American wilderness, Graham also roamed the streets of New York, Chicago, and other cities not to mention padding the roads of Great Britain and large tracts of continental Europe. Yet, as with most of the other tramps discussed here, Graham expressed the extreme feelings of restlessness that are the hallmark of those bitten by the wanderlust: It is true the wanderer often feels bored, even in beautiful places. … I get tired of this world and want another. That is a common feeling, if not often analysed.⁸

Following the death of his mother at the age of six, Jim Tully (1886–1947) was left by his father in an orphanage for the next six years of his life. The institution was run along prison lines, with strict rules and beatings for infringements. What Tully got from his incarceration was ready access to classical literature and a passion for reading and writing. After eventually being rescued from the orphanage by his older brother, he was then sent to work on an isolated farm with an illiterate farmer. There Tully slaved for two winters in sub-zero conditions in threadbare clothing before finally running away, still aged only thirteen. He eventually returned to his hometown of St. Marys where he lived with his older sister and found work in the furnaces of a local chain factory before finally succumbing to his latent wanderlust. There are many parallels between Tully and Jim Christy apart from their obvious tramping, frequent arrests for vagrancy, and writing. These include, as children learning about sex for free from professionals in the art, professional boxing, working as a tree surgeon, and a sometime career in the movies. But the most interesting comparisons are to be made with their time spent in carnivals and with carnival performers, in Tully’s case chronicled in his book Circus Parade (1927). Tully’s first role in the carnival was unique. He was employed by Amy the Beautiful Fat Girl to crawl under a heavy glass stage on which the five-hundred-pound Amy danced, and shine different colored lights up through the glass to illuminate the angelic dancer—at the same time praying that the glass would not break. Tully’s road kid adventures are graphic, such as nearly losing a foot on his first train ride, escaping from the blind baggage of another train handcuffed to another hobo after kicking a railroad detective from the train, and a nightmare train journey as Tully, burning with fever and his throat aching with thirst, risked riding lying flat on the roof of a cattle car in order to reach Chicago and medical help. Then there was a twenty-one-hour trip spent clinging to the Fast Flyer Virginia roaring through the tunnels of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Such adventures are best read in full in Tully’s second book, Beggars of Life (1924), in which a young James Cagney later played Tully in the stage version. A successful writer with sixteen books to his credit, it was Tully’s writing that brought him to the notice of first his lifelong friend H.L. Mencken, and later the screen tramp Charlie Chaplin, whom he worked for as ghostwriter and publicist for many years before they finally had a falling out. Tully’s outspokenness and his hostile and ridiculing reviews of the movie industry and its stars—including openly criticizing Chaplin for casting the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Lillita McMurray in the lead female role for The Gold Rush and getting her pregnant—would earn him a reputation as the most feared and hated man in Hollywood.⁹

Dublin-born Jim Phelan (1895–1966) published twenty-five books and collaborated on others. He also wrote poetry, song lyrics, plays, film scores, and, in the last years of his life, narrated a TV documentary for BBC Wales on gypsies. Phelan embarked on his first tramping adventure at the age of four, using his natural gift in chicanery to make the one-hundred-mile trip to Tipperary. When in danger, he wrote, it is the tramp’s natural impulse to turn around and head for the horizon. At the age of seven, fearing a beating from his father, Phelan headed off to the canal basin and hid himself under a tarpaulin covering a barge—his first sailor tramp. By the age of thirteen he managed to sail as far as Glasgow where he joined a gang of slum kids and learnt to speak Scotch. Phelan was an infant prodigy, already at school by the age of twenty-one months (with a photo and school certificate to prove it) and reading better than most adults by the age of three. But to the disappointment of his parents and teachers his destiny did not lie in academia. Phelan’s tramping career in Ireland, the UK, America, and France, was brought to an abrupt end when at the age of thirty-nine he was accused as an accessory to a fatal