On a cold, gray day in 1991, a kid named Eddy Joe Cotton left home with nothing but a warm jacket, some well-worn boots, and a few crumpled dollar bills. His father had just fired him, not for the first time, but for the last. He didn’t see his father again for two years. But this is not the story of a runaway—it is a tale of an unorthodox road to adulthood. By taking to the trains, Eddy Joe Cotton learned the difficulty of life lived on the margins, the fading importance of a once-celebrated American folk hero, and the ultimate meaning of freedom.

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

No one said life on the road would be easy. Navigating the rails, mapping bus lines, and hitching rides. Dealing with hunger when you don't have a nickel to chew on. Picking up an odd job here and making a few bucks there. But that's why it's exciting. It's one hell of an adventure. It's a thrilling road to follow if you're up to the challenge. And this book's your back-pocket saving grace. As you flip to the next flop, you'll need to know how to get by in order to stay one step ahead. Realize: a hobo isn't some bum looking for a handout. You need to be ready to put in the effort. If you want to make your way in the Jungle and along your route, you need the know-how provided within. This is the textbook to your open-road education.

From playwright and TV writer Alena Smith comes a hilarious and irreverent illustrated book based on the popular Twitter feed (@tweenhobo), featuring a young spunky girl who sets out in search of freedom, adventure, and her own personal obsession: Justin Bieber tickets. Get ready to laugh and learn with the littlest hobo. She’s only twelve years old, but a “hard twelve.” You’ll meet her friends: Stumptown Jim (her weatherbeaten BFFL); Tin Cap Earl (who’s always down to shoot a junkyard haul video); Toothpick Frank (who learns to love Pinterest); Salt Chunk Annie (a “woman of the night,” whatever that means); and Hot Johnny Two-Cakes (who Tween Hobo swears she does NOT have a crush on). Find out how she survives, thanks in part to strawberry lip gloss. You’ll hear her take on major cultural events (“I go off a fiscal cliff every time I go near a Claire’s”). And you’ll enjoy beautiful hand-rendered illustrations that bring out the beauty in her words—just like how eyeliner makes a hobo’s look really pop. Often snarky and frequently ridiculous, this imaginative journal-like book includes maps, jokes, laughs, doodles, tips, hobo symbols (“House with a triangle on top means PIZZA PARTY!!!), games, stories, and more. So grab your iPhone and wrap it in a handkerchief, tie it to a stick, and let’s roll!

Includes a short history of hobos, oral histories of American hobos, recipes, and a glossary.

Ever since track was first laid for the great locomotives, hobos have listened to the call of the rails, lured by the possibility of free transportation to another place-if they could make their way unnoticed and unharmed. They rode the rails for various reasons-to escape economic hardship, satisfy an urge for adventure, or simply to feed their wanderlust. Along the way, they developed their own culture. Mulligan Stew contains a variety of ingredients from the hobo culture: hobo life as it was lived at the turn of the twentieth century, women hobos, hobo heroes, hobo signs and symbols, contemporary hobos telling of their experiences, and hobo traditions from the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa-an event that has opened a door into the hobo world every August for more than 100 years. The convention motto is "There's a Little Bit of Hobo in All of Us." Readers who are hobos at heart are invited to open this book and savor the stew. Praise for Mulligan Stew: No book I know has captured the varieties of hobo experience as well as Barbara Hacha's Mulligan Stew, and in a form that perfectly fits the phenomenon... -Luther the Jet, Hobo King 1995-96

Nels Anderson was a pioneer in the study of the homeless. In the early 1920s Anderson combined his own experience "on the bummery," with his keen sociological insight to give voice to a largely ignored underclass. He remains an extraordinary and underrated figure in the history of American sociology. On Hobos and Homelessness includes Anderson's rich and vibrant ethnographic work of a world of homeless men. He conducted his study on Madison street in Chicago, and we come to intimately know this portion of the 1920s hobo underworld—the harshness of vagrant life and the adventures of young hobos who come to the big city. This selection also includes Anderson's later work on the juvenile and the tramp, the unattached migrant, and the family. Like John Steinbeck's Depression-era observations, Anderson's writings express the memory of those who do not seem entitled to have memory, whose lives were expressed in temporary labor.