Introduction

Though he deserted Coxey's Army at Hannibal, Missouri, when the Army ran out of food, and continued to New York City, hoboing on his own before riding the US and Canadian rails home to California, his Tramp Diary, his essays and stories on hoboing, and, most famously, his book The Road, draw a portrait of many people on the Road and mostly, of course, of the author himself, not unlike London's later semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) and alcoholic memoirs, John Barleycorn (1913). The Road has often puzzled London experts along with more general readers; unlike The People of the Abyss (1903), with its searing illustrations made by London himself and its ideas about how to repair the situation of the poor of London, and also unlike his other illustrated book, Th e Cruise of the Snark (1911), again with his own cameras, The Road contains illustrations that are not at all realistic or naturalistic, a hodgepodge of drawings from the serial version, stock photos from Macmillan, plus some posed shots of someone who is not Jack London. Clint Pumphrey and Bradford Cole provide invaluable insights into London's hand-written notes of his hoboing in a battered address book, called the Tramp Diary, which is housed in the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. The ultimate generational kickoff film, Easy Rider won the prize at Cannes and helped change Hollywood forever-it moved to embrace the new "counter-culture," which now as then means some form of the Road, an instance of a burgeoning new naturalism in cinema, and the first motion picture to eschew a new soundtrack for numbers from popular new artists, Steppenwolf, The Band, Bob Dylan.