Word: hobo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...touring production of Shakespeare's Henry V when, some time in the 1880s he decided to "emerge from the murk and chaos and leap up on the stage of human affairs." His stage was the toughest strip of the Sydney waterfront. He organized a wharf laborers' union. Hobo life had given him chronic dyspepsia and affected his hearing, but he discovered a powerful voice, tuneless, yet penetrating enough, as he himself said, "to peel the bark off a gum tree," or "galvanize ten dead bullocks to a trot." A gnomelike figure (5 ft. tall, under 100 lbs.), among...
Hungry & Unloved Into the Chicago offices of Armour & Co. one day in 1887 walked a hobo with a letter for the president. Its plea: give me $25. Meatpacker Philip D. Armour got a kick out of the writer's literary style, ordered the $25 paid to him, and said, "It's worth it." The writing hobo was a 28-year-old Norwegian immigrant with goldrimmed spectacles and an aristocratic face. In Norway he had been a cobbler's apprentice, woodsman, stevedore and road navvy. He had come steerage to the U.S., worked for tight-fisted Wisconsin farmers...
...Hobo at Heart. His prize-winning novel was an idealized picture of a frontiersman's struggle with the soil, the state, society and himself. Popular critics called Hamsun a great nature writer, but other novels such as The Woman at the Pump, the story of an emasculated man living in a sexy situation (nine years before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises), showed that Hamsun's real literary impulse, formed during his years of vagabondage, was a profound reaction to petit bourgeois life. A few years later he embraced Reaction as a political faith. His wife...
...rage of the Northwest, The Frozen Logger, was written by a onetime mule skinner, hobo poet and bull cook named Jim Stevens, one of the first men to set the tall tales of Paul Bunyan down on paper (1925). He wrote the lyrics in 1928, borrowed the melody of an old ballad to go with them. He finally got it published last year, and the folk-singing Weavers picked it up and boosted it into popularity. So much popularity, says Stevens, 59, that "I hear some of the boys in the woods are beginning to use their thumbs...
...tramp who has stolen his valise, Toto is invited to take shelter on a dreary wasteland at the city's fringe, where glum derelicts elbow one another to get into each stray shaft of sunlight that breaks through the winter clouds. By spring, Toto is busily turning the hobo jungle into a shantytown haven for Milan's poor, and imbuing them with good will. Among the newcomers is a badgered, not-quite-pretty girl (Brunella Bovo), with whom he strikes up a charmingly innocent courtship...