Nels Anderson

The Hobo Nels Anderson

2014 Reprint of 1961 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is an account, written with insight and sympathy, of the life of the hobo, life in "Hobohemia," a frontier that was already beginning to vanish when this study originally appeared in 1923. The author, drawing from his own experience as a hobo, pictures life in the "main stem" of Halsted and State Streets in Chicago. Here are the customs and class distinctions, language, songs, morals and intellectual life of this body of men who, for widely varying reasons, chose the migratory life. A new introduction by the author places the hobo in historical perspective and explains his disappearance from the American scene.