A collection of essays from Jack London’s early years, focusing on tramping and being a hobo, which he had experienced firsthand. The collection is pretty hit and miss, with the worst being the very raw and hard to follow ‘Tramp Diary’ London kept when he tramped across America in 1894 at age 18 to join a march on Washington DC. He had already been working throughout his teens in some very difficult jobs, and after the economic Panic of 1893, working men faced unemployment and difficult times. Despite his confidence in his own abilities and his feeling of rugged individualism, he threw his lot in with the working man, and this experience was truly formative for him. He became a socialist before the label had been branded with a negative stigma by the wealthy, corrupt people in power, and his writings that lay out the case for this, in particular ‘What Life Means to Me’ from 1906 are fantastic. His harrowing descriptions of hitching rides on trains, including to the rods beneath the cars in ‘Rods and Gunnels’ from 1902, were also very interesting. Don’t confuse the essay titled ‘The Road’ that’s included here with his 1907 book though. ( )