During the great depression year of 1893 (the worst in the history of the United States until then), when he was only seventeen, Jack London (1876-1916) joined the nation-wide protest movement known as Kelly's Army to march from San Francisco to Washington with thousands of others.
He spent an entire year on the road, an experience which he summarized in his autobiographical memoir Jack London, by Himself as follows: "I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston, and up and down, returning to the Pacific Coast by way of Canada, where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole tramping experience made me become a Socialist.".
Although he had spent more time on the road tramping than he did in the Klondike a few short years afterwards, only five of his stories dwell on this timeless theme (84 of his stories are based on his Klondike experiences) - and all the more precious they are for that, in our eyes.
If you are going to read only one of his rare "hobo" stories, this hard-nosed but delicate and even moving account of a day in one tramp's life, first published in 1911, is the one to go for - somehow it says it all.
