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Jack London got off to a busy start in life. Born in 1876, before he took off from Oakland CA to be a 17-year-old hobo, he'd worked 12-hour days at a cannery, owned his own boat as an oyster pirate, and sailed to Japan on a sealing ship, among other things. By the time these tales of his adventures crossing the country by rail in 1893-94 were published in 1907, he was already famous for his novels Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and White Fang.

The nine sketches are a mix of training manual for life riding the trains and anecdotes of London's own experiences among the horde of hoboes driven to the rails by the Panic of 1893. He covers in some detail the jargon, rules of the road, and physical techniques for jumping on and getting off moving trains, while evading the "shacks", i.e. brakemen, and other railroad crewmen, and explains the mindset necessary for successful begging for food and clothes at houses and on the street in between trains.

Generally not given to waxing eloquently about the vast swathes of the country he passed through, London was quite taken with Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, his visit resulted in a sentence of 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary for vagrancy. His account of his arrest and trial has an almost humorous tone, but there's nothing funny about his time in the "Pen", and as corrupt and violent as he describes it being, he also confesses he's passing lightly over "unprintable" and unthinkable" horrors.

As a native Hawkeye, I found his description of travelling across Iowa with Kelly's Army, from Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, to Keokuk, on the Mississippi, to be fascinating. The 2,000-strong Army of unemployed had jumped trains from California to Omaha, but the railroads said no more free rides. Following an unsuccessful effort to hijack a train, the Army headed east on foot and the plot thickened.

There's not really a narrative arc to The Road and it just ends, without much development or resolution along the way. For having already published "How I became a Socialist" in the March 1903 issue of The Comrade, London doesn't get very political in the book, either. He uses several racist terms for blacks, but otherwise doesn't express racist views.

The free LibriVox audiobook I listened to was a good choice for my daily walk, but there were a few mispronunciations.