THE HOBO WRITER
The hobo who reads sooner or later tries his hand at writing. A surprisingly large number of them eventually realize their ambition to get into print. It is not unusual to meet a man of the road with a number of clippings in his pocket of articles he has contributed to the daily press. Most of the great dailies have columns that are accessible to the free-lance writer, and the pages of the radical press are always open to productions of the hobo pen. Most of these contributions are in the form of letters to editors. One man who writes many such letters proudly exhibited an article recently published in the Chicago Daily Tribune. It was signed “F. W. B.” He explained that these letters stood for “Fellow Worker Block.” That was his nom de plume.
The hobo writer does not concern himself with letters alone. A number of them are ambitious to become novelists, essayists, and even dramatists. Some of these men have manuscripts that they have carried about with them for years in search of a publisher. One such author, an old man, said: “I have material enough together to write a book. All I want is to get someone to help me organize it. I want someone to go over it with me. You see, I never had much schooling and my grammar is not very good.” Another man carried about a great roll of manuscript which purported to be a “society novel.” It was entitled The Literary in Literature. It was written in lead pencil and represented the accumulated effort of several years. When the mood struck him, he added a chapter or a paragraph. Before the last page had been written, however, the first was so badly dimmed from being carried around that it could not be deciphered.
Some hobo writers have visions of a financial success that will put them on “easy street.” One man offered to share the proceeds from the publications of a series of essays on economics if the investigator would typewrite it. “Why, this will bring thousands of dollars,” he said. “If I can only get a publisher interested, but,” he added, “they don’t seem to care for live subjects.”
Another hobo writes songs and has the same difficulty with publishers. He still feels, after hundreds of failures, that he will eventually get into the limelight.
The hobo writer who plies the pen for the love of it is not unusual. One man has been working on a play for several months. He cannot get anyone interested, but that has not quenched his enthusiasm. Another man spends most of his leisure on the north side of Hobohemia, writing fantastic paragraphs. They are interesting and amusing. He does not try to publish them. He writes them because he enjoys it. Most numerous of the hobo writers are the propagandists and dreamers. They are the chief contributors to the rebel press. Many of them care to be identified with no other. They are not artists nor do they write for gain. They have little patience for the writer who lives for the so-called “filthy lucre.”
But whatever their motive, most of these hobo writers, for the want of a better medium, become contributors to the radical press. Without them radical sheets like the I.W.W. publications and the Hobo News would not appeal to the homeless man. The radical press in turn serves as a pattern by which hobo writers fashion and color their literary productions.