The Vanishing American Hobo (1960). Detailed description

“The Vanishing American Hobo” first appeared in the March 1960 issue of the now-defunct travel magazine Holiday. It is perhaps better known, though, for its republication in the 1960 volume Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac’s first outspokenly autobiographical work. Notably, the republication includes the additional last line “The woods are full of wardens.” In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac recalls the years he spent gathering the life experience he compiled in his novels, forsaking in these pieces the guise of fiction while maintaining his trademark Beat style.

In “Vanishing,” Kerouac glorifies the hobo and his various manifestations throughout the American landscape, from the California pack rat traveler to the urban street panhandler. According to his biographer Ellis Amburn, the prototype of Kerouac’s American hobo is William Holmes “Big Slim” Hubbard, a war buddy of Jack’s with whom he was discharged and transferred back to the United States for reasons of mental instability. As Neal Cassady later would, Big Slim, a fellow former football player, represented to Kerouac a “charming derelict” for whom society would always provide because of his magnetism and his appeal to nurturing women (Amburn 73).

While glorifying his archetypal hobo, Kerouac also criticizes a society that increasingly forces the hobo to vanish. He points out the irony that while camping is a glorified activity for Boy Scouts, a grown man sleeping in the woods can end up in jail for vagrancy. He condemns American society’s ever-increasing police force, whom he characterizes as destroyers of freedom, supported by taxpayers’ dollars, who seem to have nothing better to do than harass well-meaning hobos. Kerouac recounts an instance when he was walking in an Arizona desert looking for a place to sleep and was accosted by three police cars. The police question him and finally let him go, though they cannot seem to understand why a man would want to sleep outside when he can afford a hotel room.

Kerouac further faults the media, who portray “the cop heroes on TV,” for the disappearance of the American hobo. He asserts that the media instill a fear of the hobo in the American people, “because of what newspapers made the hobo to be—the rapist, the strangler, child-eater.” He also claims that the end to his hoboing resulted from increasing television stories about “the abominableness of strangers with packs.” Writing at the end of the 1950s, Kerouac prophesies the incredible power of the media to shape the opinions of the American people, which would become an integral part of critiques of American culture in the years to come.

Closely linked to the increasing media presence in America is increasing consumerism. Kerouac documents in The Dharma Bums (1958) the sentiments of his close friend, the then-aspiring Buddhist guru Gary Snyder, using the fictionalized character of Japhy Ryder. Ryder refers to a “rucksack revolution,” in which young people will forsake mainstream consumerist culture and experience true freedom within the American landscape: “Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway . . . general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway” (97).

Kerouac’s archetypal hobo is such a traveler, a “dharma bum” who may traverse physical space, but whose true quest is an internal struggle against mainstream consumer culture and toward spiritual freedom. Furthermore, Kerouac compares the hobo to a Buddhist monk, who participates in a culture that values poverty and freedom from desire as a virtue. In his “Biographical Resume,” also composed in 1958 and later published in Heaven and Other Poems (1977), Kerouac writes, “I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese way of the Tao: ‘avoid the authorities’” (40).

While “The Vanishing American Hobo” certainly illustrates Kerouac’s desire to “avoid the authorities,” it also suggests a message that is perhaps lacking in his more apolitical work The Dharma Bums. Kerouac is critical of the changing attitudes of post-World War II American culture, a time of economic prosperity for some, but of growing intolerance for those who refuse to conform to the mainstream.

For Discussion or Writing
1. In “The Vanishing American Hobo,” Kerouac argues for the hobo status of numerous historical and cultural figures, from Jesus to W. C. Fields. Utilizing his criteria, defend another celebrity as Kerouac’s archetypal American hobo.

2. Kerouac writes, “I myself was a hobo but only of sorts, as you see, because I knew someday my literary efforts would be rewarded by social protection.” He cites 1956 as the year he gave up hoboing. Incidentally, 1957 marks the commercial success of his novel On the Road. Is it possible that Kerouac’s literary success, rather than his theories in the essay, distanced him from his hobo lifestyle? If so, does this weaken his argument?

3. In this essay, Kerouac expresses his belief that removing oneself from mainstream society is the only valid method of resistance, writing, “The Hobo is born of pride, having nothing to do with a community but with himself and other hobos and maybe a dog.” Consider the implications of Kerouac’s emphasis on individualism, especially in light of the social movements that would occur in the decades following the publication of “Hobo.”