Rolling Nowhere
Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes
In Ted Conover's first book, now back in print, he enters a segment of humanity outside society and reports back on a world few of us would chose to enter but about which we are all curious.
Hoboes fascinated Conover, but he had only encountered them in literature and folksongs. So, he decided to take a year off and ride the rails. Equipped with rummage-store clothing, a bedroll, and a few other belongings, he hops a freight train in St. Louis, becoming a tramp in order to discover their peculiar culture. The men and women he meets along the way are by turns generous and mistrusting, resourceful and desperate, philosophical and profoundly cynical. And the narrative he creates of his travels…
$24.95
September 11, 2001Ted Conover is the author most recently of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, named one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York’s Sing Sing prison, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Conover’s other books include Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, The Routes of Man, and Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep. He has written for publications including The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and Harper’s. Twice his work has been an answer on “Jeopardy!” He is now professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter…