Hobohemia

Description

TITLE: Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920s Chicago
AUTHOR: Frank O. Beck
YEAR: 1956 (First Edition)
PUBLISHER: Richard R. Smith Publisher, Inc.

Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920s Chicago is a vivid account of a colorful, dynamic, creative and radical community of hoboes which flourished in Chicago from the 1910s through the Depression ’30s. It chronicles Chicago’s wild Near North Side: Bughouse Square, the nation’s most renowned outdoor free-speech center. The Hobo College, the fabulous Dill Pickle Club are described, as well as the anarchists, Wobblies, feminists, poets, artists and others who frequented them.

It was something like New York’s Greenwich Village, but — thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW — much more working class, and more openly revolutionary. Frank O. Beck’s Hobohemia contains a long time Towertowner’s vivid reminiscences of this colorful, dynamic, creative, and radical community that flourished for a generation despite constant onslaughts from the Red Squad, the Vice Squad, bourgeois journalists, and fundamentalist bigots. Originally published in 1956, this handsome new edition contains a superb introduction from Franklin Rosemont, providing a historical overview of Chicago’s working class counter-culture, and a biographical sketch of Beck. It also relates the book to earlier and later literature on the subject and fills in some gaps in the narrative.

This is a first edition copy of Hobohemia (it was reprinted in 2000 by Chicago’s Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co.). As you can see in the photos, the spine is quite sun-faded, but other than that, it’s in very good condition for its age! A fun piece of Midwest history.

Also available in person in the Michigan/Midwest history section of the bookstore in South Haven, Michigan.