"In 1894, an eighteen-year-old Jack London quit his job shoveling coal, hopped a freight train, and left California on the first leg of a ten thousand-mile odyssey. His adventure was an exaggerated version of the unemployed migrations made by millions of boys, men, and a few women during the original "great depression" of the 1890s. By taking to the road, young wayfarers like London forged a vast hobo subculture that was both a product of the new urban industrial order and a challenge to it ... The best stories that London told about his hoboing days can be found in The Road, a collection of nine essays, ... most of which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine between 1907 and 1908"--Amazon.com.
