London - The Road

THE R OAD

Jack London

D OVER P UBLICATIONS, I NC.

M INEOLA, N EW Y ORK

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET B. KOPITO

Copyright

Note copyright 2016 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

The Road, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2016, is a republication of the work originally published by Macmillan, New York, in 1907. This work includes some racial content that may be objectionable to readers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: London, Jack, 18761916, author.

Title: The road / Jack London.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, [2016] | Series: Dover thrift editions | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021414 | ISBN 9780486811208 (softcover) | ISBN 0486811204 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: London, Jack, 18761916TravelUnited States. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | PrisonersUnited StatesBiography. | TrampsUnited StatesBiography. | Railroad travelUnited States. | VagrancyUnited States. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.

Classification: LCC PS3523.O46 Z46 2016 | DDC 813/.52 [B] dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021414

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

81120401 2016

www.doverpublications.com

Note

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876. He worked on the waterfront while in school and was fond of tales of travel and adventure, which he read avidly. These tales served as both an inspiration and a foundation for his own writing, which included novels, short stories, essays, and autobiographies. At seventeen, London went to sea, signing up for the seal-hunting vessel the Sophie Sutherland. During the voyage, London visited Japan and the coast of Siberia, the location of the seal hunt.

Upon returning to California, London attended high school and then the University of California at Berkeley. Once more, his thirst for adventure and wanderlust struck. It was the late 1890s, and the Klondike gold rush drew him to the Canadian Yukon Territory, providing rich material for his writing. His best-known work, The Call of the Wild (1903), featuring Buck, as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild, as well as White Fang (1906), pitted heroic working dogs against both their human captors and the forces of nature.

London's fortunes turned in 1904 with the publication of his novel The Sea-Wolf, based on his own seal-hunting voyage (the work was originally published in 1903 in Century Magazine). Several years after the publication of The Sea-Wolf, London and his second wife, Charmian, sailed to the South Pacific in their ketch. London fell ill during the trip and spent six months in Australia recuperating. The couple returned to California in 1909. London, greatly affected by the loss of his mansion, Wolf House, which burned down before its completion, died in 1916.

In The Road (1907), Jack London chronicles his days as a hobo during the economically depressed 1890s. Leavened with humor reminiscent of Mark Twain, yet often grim in its realistic depictions of the lives of the indigent, London recounts his life on The Road, as well as his incarceration in a Pennsylvania prison for vagrancy. With references to hobo slang, the information-sharing practiced by the wanderers, and the violence and hazards of the hobo existence, London concludes, I had taken the train out the wrong way. I had lost a nights sleep, I had been soaked to the skin, I had been chased for my life; and for all my pains I was back where I had started. But his experiences on The Road had once again enabled him to craft an engaging, moving story based on his hunger for adventure. In his own words: Every once in a while, in newspapers, magazines, and biographical dictionaries, I run upon sketches of my life, wherein, delicately phrased, I learn that it was in order to study sociology that I became a tramp. This is very nice and thoughtful of the biographers, but it is inaccurate. I became a trampwell, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest.

Contents

Speakin in general, I ave tried em all, The appy roads that take you oer the world. Speakin in general, I ave found them good For such as cannot use one bed too long, But must get ence, the same as I ave done, An go observin matters till they die.

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal.

To

JOSIAH FLYNT

THE REAL THING, BLOWED IN THE GLASS

CONFESSION

THERE IS A woman in the state of Nevada to whom I once lied continuously, consistently, and shamelessly, for the matter of a couple of hours. I dont want to apologize to her. Far be it from me. But I do want to explain. Unfortunately, I do not know her name, much less her present address. If her eyes should chance upon these lines, I hope she will write to me.

It was in Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1892. Also, it was fair-time, and the town was filled with petty crooks and tin-horns, to say nothing of a vast and hungry horde of hoboes. It was the hungry hoboes that made the town a hungry town. They battered the back doors of the homes of the citizens until the back doors became unresponsive.

A hard town for scoffings, was what the hoboes called it at that time. I know that I missed many a meal, in spite of the fact that I could throw my feet with the next one when it came to slamming a gate for a poke-out or a set-down, or hitting for a light piece on the street. Why, I was so hard put in that town, one day, that I gave the porter the slip and invaded the private car of some itinerant millionnaire. The train started as I made the platform, and I headed for the aforesaid millionnaire with the porter one jump behind and reaching for me. It was a dead heat, for I reached the millionnaire at the same instant that the porter reached me. I had no time for formalities. Gimme a quarter to eat on, I blurted out. And as I live, that millionnaire dipped into his pocket and gave me... just... precisely... a quarter. It is my conviction that he was so flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and it has been a matter of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didnt ask him for a dollar. I know that Id have got it. I swung off the platform of that private car with the porter manoeuvring to kick me in the face. He missed me. One is at a terrible disadvantage when trying to swing off the lowest step of a car and not break his neck on the right of way, with, at the same time, an irate Ethiopian on the platform above trying to land him in the face with a number eleven. But I got the quarter! I got it!

But to return to the woman to whom I so shamelessly lied. It was in the evening of my last day in Reno. I had been out to the race-track watching the ponies run, and had missed my dinner (i.e. the midday meal). I was hungry, and, furthermore, a committee of public safety had just been organized to rid the town of just such hungry mortals as I. Already a lot of my brother hoboes had been gathered in by John Law, and I could hear the sunny valleys of California calling to me over the cold crests of the Sierras. Two acts remained for me to perform before I shook the dust of Reno from my feet. One was to catch the blind baggage on the westbound overland that night. The other was first to get something to eat. Even youth will hesitate at an all-night ride, on an empty stomach, outside a train that is tearing the atmosphere through the snow-sheds, tunnels, and eternal snows of heaven-aspiring mountains.