Boxcar bertha thompson biography books

They include such people as pimps, politicians, policemen, judges, and religious leaders. The oppressors represent the propertied classes and their main role, according to the hoboes, is to pass and enforce doctrines aimed at persecuting them. Another thing, I was immensely taken with the hoboes' charms of the mind. I really enjoyed their lyrical and philosophical conversations about life and politics.

Sometimes I had to control my desire to laugh out loud at their filthy language and jokes. In the end, I did not accept all the views for or against society that were expressed in this book, but I do not reject them either. Sometimes they do exaggerate, but even then, they have nothing to loose by their exaggeration but the chains the society has placed on them.

It's not so much that I think true stories are somehow better than fiction, but that I appreciate them differently. For instance, I adore the novel Jane Eyre and am not in the least bit disturbed that there is no way it could be a true story, yet the movie Erin Brockovich would not be nearly so charming if it were not true. Described as the autobiography of a hobo "free-thinking and free-loving" woman in the early twentieth century, it sounded radical and inspiring.

And the book was radical and inspiring, right up until the afterward, where it was confessed that Sister of the Road was not, in fact, an autobiography, but rather a work of fiction. Let's just say that I was very annoyed.

Boxcar bertha thompson biography books

I still think that Sister of the Road is an interesting story and one worth reading. However, I would be much more interesting in reading the life story of the man who wrote it. Ben Reitman was a hobo, a writer, a doctor, an agitator, an educator, a lover of Emma Goldman and a distributor of birth control information at a time when such doing so was illegal and highly dangerous.

Now that would be an interesting story. But back to the book at hand. Once I recovered from my peevishness at being duped, I realized that Sister of the Road really did not lose much for not being literally true. After all, Reitman based this book largely on three women that he knew, as well as material from hundreds of conversations he had with various tramps, hoboes, and other people on the road throughout the course of his life.

It remains a provocative glimpse into a way of life and an entire culture that most people were never aware existed. Boxcar Bertha grew up in communes, railway yards, and in hobo hotels that her mother, who both practiced and preached free-love, operated. Her education was primarily one of speaking with vagrants, socialist, and activists of all kinds.

By the time she was sixteen, she was criss-crossing the country on trains, mostly by hoboing, very rarely paying her way, even when she had the money. She loved and left men, fell into a life of crime and then walked away, she spent time in a prison, a venereal disease hospital, a brothel, and working in an abortion clinic. There are very few aspects of underground life that she does not delve into.

The most amazing thing about Sister of the Road is that for the majority of the book, it remains uplifting even in the midst of what might what be taken to be very dark circumstances. The only times Bertha really gives over into depression is when someone she loves dies. The rest of the time she plows ahead with a matter of fact optimism, determined to make the best of everything.

Determined to never think ill of her fellow wanderers, she seeks out the motivations of why people do the things that they do. Here is where the reader truly benefits from Dr. Reitman's hundreds of interviews, as he illuminates how people come to be the people they are, and why they believe what they profess to believe. Conversely, perhaps the greatest weakness of this book is simply the amount of time that has passed since it was written.

Trains are no longer as commonly used as a method of transportation as they once were, and when the book describes the various places a hobo could ride on a train, I only rarely could understand what they were talking about. These distinctions were often important, as certain ways of riding the train were much more dangerous than others, and it would have been nice to be able to picture them as I read.

Such minor complaints aside, Sister of the Road truly is an amazing novel. It is an autobiography not of a single woman, but of thousands of men and women who dropped out of the dominant culture to live life on different terms. These are lives and stories rarely told in history texts, and that's exactly what makes this book so valuable.

David Crumm. Author 6 books 88 followers. An artifact of American alternative writing I decided to seek out one of the many editions of "Boxcar Bertha," the novel on which Martin Scorsese based his early shoestring movie with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, after learning that there was such a book some months ago here on Goodreads.

Since I'm a lifelong journalist, I was fascinated by what claimed to be an original oral history of a feminist "Hobo. In fact, it's a narrative written by the infamously progressive Ben Reitman Reitman was a real historical figure who styled himself as a physician to the poor and sometimes was known as the "Hobo doctor. He claimed to have based this account on a number of women he had known in the Hobo worlds in which he moved.

So, now, I realize this book, which often was marketed over the decades as a shockingly honest book about sexuality and poverty, really is more of an example of propaganda by Reitman for his views about the world and his hopes for an idealistic Hobo community. Some early editions screamed from the front cover bright red in one edition that this was an "uncensored" book.

Before any readers of this review leap to the conclusion that this is erotic literature, however, that's certainly not the case. And, in fact, it's one of the most deeply troubling aspects of this book. Reitman celebrates the fact that his Boxcar Bertha grew up quite healthy and happy, even though she was repeatedly abused by a much older man while she was underage.

In the book, she does not even regard this as abuse. In Reitman's fantasy, she welcomes this and it's part of her healthy upbringing. So, at this point, do you see why I'm giving this 1 star? Now that it's clear this book is Reitman's fantasy about women Hoboes, it becomes a deeply troubling manuscript. Plus, Reitman's narrative is full of factual holes that even a little research reveals as pure fiction.

One big example: Because Reitman was, indeed, involved in helping to set up a Hobo College in Chicago what we might call today a shelter for people without homes , Reitman fantasizes in this novel that these Hobo Colleges had been set up all across America. There's a scene in which Bertha visits a Hobo College that operates like a research library run by Hoboes themselves.

In fact, that particular center Reitman describes Bertha visiting never existed. Because Reitman clearly is an unreliable narrator and also seems to be far more interested in promoting his own sexual fantasies, I wound up deeply disappointed with this book and particularly because Reitman seems be rationalizing under-age relationships with older men, I have to give it 1 star and write up this review warning others about what I think of, now, as a troubling text.

Please do not misunderstand. I am a staunch advocate of free speech and Reitman did, indeed, write this book. I can see this book having value in research or college courses exploring early alternative movements in which Reitman was active. I'm not suggesting the book be banned. I've simply concluded for myself that it's a different kind of historical artifact than I thought it was when I bought a used copy and began reading.

The female "You Can't Win," sort of. Belongs on the top shelf of your Hobo Studies collection, or at least of mine. Back in the days when there were Drive-in movie theaters, after the main show, you needed filler for the 2nd or even 3rd feature. Bloody, action packed, bank robbing female hobo during the Great Depression? You may even end up seeing it several times over a summer of movie going.

Author, Medical Dr Reitman, was at times a hobo himself and championed many health causes for the down and out in the s and s. Toss in the fact that many of the hoboes, we would generally call homeless nowadays, have to exist by stealing and scamming the public and you have a compelling tale. The book was used for years as a sociological study before it was discredited.

I found it an entertaining, compelling read especially as many of the hoboes were out there by choice, just not wanting to deal with society, answering that lonesome whistle blow. It is a look into a world one hopes to never have to enter. Author 7 books followers. A wild, whirlwind tour through early 20th century radicalism, criminality, and hobo living.

Though the protagonist is clearly fictional, the world she lives in rings true And speaking of old movies, Reitman isn't much physical description, so I'd advise watching some period cinema on YouTube before reading to better imagine the scenery. Even without visuals the boxcar rides are thrilling, the crime is horrifying, the poverty is heartbreaking, and the injustices are appalling.

The most valuable thing about the book, to my mind, is how it clearly demonstrates the emancipated frame of mind is not a modern invention. Long before the Beats and Hippies there were Free Spirits who defied bourgeois convention to live imaginatively and adventurously. Emi Yoshida. This memoir of Boxcar Bertha chronicles her family, friends, and her extensively traveled life.

As promised on the cover, it is frank and includes intimate facts about a woman hobo's methods and habits; but much like its subject, it's a bit rough and tumble. I had respect for Bertha and her free-thinking family of progressive socialists, because despite their untraditional nomadic way of life they valued education and parented valiantly - until I got to page , when Bertha says to herself in a prison hospital after becoming a prostitute in order to gain that experience , "Me?

Bertha Thompson, Mother Thompson's daughter? I couldn't have syphilis! I couldn't be pregnant! I knew about birth control. The doctor must be mistaken. I couldn't have gonorrhea! This must be a joke, I told myself. I'm Box Car Bertha! I've lived through everything. I'm not a whore. I'm not the kind of woman to whom these things happen!

Even though I didn't really buy the author's voice as that of a woman, I am intrigued by the Nabat series it belongs to, "dedicated to reprinting memoirs of truly interesting and meaningful lives and real adventures on the margins of what Kenneth Rexroth called 'the social lie'. Even now in these deadly days of depression, all we have out of the chaos is the rich growing richer and more powerful and more arrogant and the bulk of the poor growing more submissive and adapting themselves by force to a lower scale of living!

Keturah Lamb. Author 3 books 65 followers. Another recommendation from Andy! Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.

Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Hobo jungles, bughouses, whorehouses, Chicago's Main Stem, IWW meeting halls, skid rows and open freight cars--these were the haunts of the free thinking and free loving Bertha Thompson. This vivid autobiography recounts one hell of a rugged woman's hard-living depression-era saga of misadventures with pimps, hopheads, murderers, yeggs, wobblies and anarchists.

This edition has a new afterword by Barry Pateman, curator of UC Berkeley's Emma Goldman Papers, which contains information on the background of the book, and of author Dr. Ben Reitman.