Book contents
- Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Context
- Part II The Vagabond and the Tramp
- Part III The Hobo Transformed
- Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Recent books in this series (continued from page ii)
Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2023
- Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Context
- Part II The Vagabond and the Tramp
- Part III The Hobo Transformed
- Conclusion: The End of the Road? Transiency beyond the Hobo
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Recent books in this series (continued from page ii)
Summary
The Conclusion begins by showing that the hobo was a picturesque archetype that was portrayed as being on the verge of extinction from its very inception. When the ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ actually came to an end following the conclusion of World War 2, however, the popular image of transiency shifted to the automobile, which had been providing its own road narratives for several decades but which found its popular spokesperson in the figure of Jack Kerouac, whose writing combined the spiritual literary vagabond tradition of Vachel Lindsay with an idealisation of the picturesque hobo. The Conclusion briefly traces the representation of transiency in the wake of On the Road, including the development of the ‘road movie’ and the way in which numerous singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the mantle of the countercultural drifter. I outline the growth of homelessness, voluntary ‘lifestyle’ transiency and the development of the relatively privileged ‘digital nomad’ in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a discussion of the use of train-hopping by people fleeing to Europe and the US to escape poverty, violence and climate change.
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- Vagabonds, Tramps, and HobosThe Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940, pp. 230 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023