Transients created what was arguably the first counterculture in the modern United States, known as ‘hobohemia’. This Introduction argues that hobohemia was a literary subculture, the fruits of which included fiction, poetry, autobiography, sociology, journalism, and popular music, including works produced by women and African-Americans. The material examined by this book, much of which has been forgotten or neglected, demonstrates that hobos were not the all-American, white, straight, male hyper-individualists that they have been seen as by much twentieth-century popular history. As well as laying out the argument and structure of the book, the Introduction argues that Hobohemia was a subculture that privileged storytelling, and that the popular genre of hobo memoir emphasises drift as a key aspect of the transient experience.

Chapter Five turns to the figure of the hobo as constructed by Nels Anderson, a former hobo who became a member of the influential ‘Chicago School’ of sociology. It argues that Anderson’s early writing, in particular The Hobo (1923) and The Milk and Honey Route (1931), projects the hobo as a distinctively American figure, separate from the supposedly European tramp because of his commitment to hard work. I argue that The Milk and Honey Route is crucial to understanding Anderson’s The Hobo. Both books contain a distinctive double voice that not only speaks to their author’s position as a hobo-turned sociologist, but also expresses scepticism towards the project of sociology itself. In making this latter argument, the chapter pays attention to Anderson’s tone and language. Making use of literary close reading, I argue that his early style is distinguished by a voice that mixes different modes, including the sociological and autobiographical, in conflicting and paradoxical ways. While earlier scholars have noted Anderson’s ambiguous representation of hobos, this chapter demonstrates that he was equally ambiguous about the sociologists who studied them.

In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.

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.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.