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2 results

  • Introduction

  • from Part I - Context
  • Owen Clayton, University of Lincoln
  • Book:
    Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
    Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 3-23

  • Summary

    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.

Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
  • The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940
  • Owen Clayton
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called 'Golden Age of Tramping' (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this 'pioneer hobo' image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around 'the hobo' and 'the tramp'. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.