Epilogue: Tramping’s Afterlife

Summary

These concluding pages briefly explore what I term the afterlife of the tramping archetype, which continued to make its presence felt in both post-war American literature and, as I will elaborate, prominent accounts of whiteness in that period. The centre of this book's Epilogue, Jack Kerouac and like-minded artists associated with the Beat movement took tramping journeys of their own while valorising the type of rebellious subjectivity they associated with Black culture. Kerouac's artistic indebtedness to vagrancy writers such as Mark Twain, Jack London and John Steinbeck is acknowledged in other accounts of the author. Rather than retread those studies, I wish to demonstrate how the literary history of tramp writing recontextualises one of the most famous examples of post-war American literature, Kerouac's On the Road (1957). This argument reiterates and extends the governmentality narrative running through The American Vagrant in Literature, which has traced how tramping literature – which codes the tramp's exceptionalism in terms of race and masculinity – counterintuitively helped to rationalise a robust liberal welfare society. In the years following the end of the Great Depression and World War II, however, the exceptional qualities once associated with tramp characters largely disappeared from the public eye (Feied 58). By reading On the Road as a text fully immersed in the tramping-narrative template, I add an essential pre-history to the relatively familiar subjects and aesthetic forms that stand out in Kerouac's novel – namely, his anguish over the institutionalisation of whiteness and, relatedly, his association of blackness with social rebellion.

Writing after World War II, Kerouac sustains the allure of tramping literature for a generation removed from the Great Depression and, more distantly, the tumultuous turn of the century. At the same time, he can only lament the disappearance of actual tramping types in post-war America. In ‘The Vanishing American Hobo’, an essay first published in Holiday magazine in 1960, Kerouac celebrates vagabondage as a quintessentially American identity while decrying the ‘increase in police surveillance’ that makes tramping impossible (164). His preoccupation with both tramping culture and the social conditions that control vagrancy already situates his work on the same spectrum of tramping artist-sociologists that includes not only London in the US but, as previous chapters established, George Orwell and W. H. Davies in the UK.