The Road by Jack London

I first read this around thirty years ago, when I was about as old as London was when he wrote it. I'm now more than a decade older than London ever got, for what that's worth. And what struck me this time was how modern a book The Road still is.

It's a model for eight or ten generations of non-fiction bestsellers since, both the "memoir of this exciting and/or dangerous and/or horrible time in my life" book and the "let me tell you about this quirky side of life, which I lived for a while and so am an expert in" tome. And London's sentences and diction are crisp twentieth-century American; almost a hundred and twenty years old but very close to The Way We'd Say It Now.

The big difference is the way he plays off slangy terms - all of the hobo lingo - in quotations, not just the first time he mentions a word, but consistently. There's still a vague hint of that Victorian fussiness about "good" and "bad" words still lurking in his head, as if the "bad" words need to be corralled and signposted.

But that's about it. He's not fussy in any other way. His sentences can get long, but never convoluted. London was a straightforward writer of things that happened, in his nonfiction as much as his fiction. That's why he was so popular: he wrote for a wide audience, and, then as now, wide audiences like as few veils between them and the reality of a book as possible.

Not long ago, read London's The People of the Abyss, which was a book with a social aim. The Road, on the other hand, is a book of yarns - a book of "hey, let me tell you the crazy things I got up to when I was seventeen and immortal and rode the rails from one end of the country to the other."

The Road has nine miscellaneous chapters: it starts in the middle and wanders about, like a storyteller, late at night in some hobo camp, telling you his best stories in the order they come to him. It told the public of 1907 more or less what it was like to ride the rails back in the mid-1890s, and my guess is that was basically still the same in 1907 (and probably similar in the 1880s, and through the next couple of decades up to the Depression, too). About two-thirds of the way in, he finally tells the story of how he went out "on the Road" - he'd spent his mid-teen years messing about on boats in San Francisco harbor, both as an "oyster pirate" and working for the authorities chasing said "pirates," and one boat trip led him into a hobo camp, which gave him the bug for a different kind of travel - but the book isn't organized in any specific way, and doesn't tell London's overall story.

That's not the point of it. This isn't "how Jack London, Famous Writer, became a tramp and What He Did On the Great Railroads of Our Nation." It's "Hey, did I ever tell you I was a hobo for a year or so? I remember this one crazy time in Des Moines....." The stories are various and jumbled by design, the time sequence is not supposed to be clear.

It's a book by a great writer, but most English teachers would be hard-pressed to consider it Great Literature, or to wring Lessons out of it. I like it even better for that.

(Minor consumer note: I read this in the Library of America Novels and Social Writings volume, which seems to be currently out of print. Since London is well out of copyright, there are a lot of editions, and their texts might not be equally authoritative. It's worth seeking out a good edition from a real publisher for OOP material. I recommend LoA strongly for any writer they've published.)