“… Jim Christy is brilliant, visceral and the words he writes ring true. He’s a person who is very much physically in this world, and it can’t help but come through in everything he does. He has a great way of telling it like it is in a way that the literary establishment might not be used to.”
—Toronto Globe & Mail

Writer and Poet Jim Christy started his life of adventure as a kid running wild in the streets of his tough-as-nails mob run South Philly neighborhood. At just 12-years-old, he made his first tramp up to the Canadian Border. By the time he read On the Road at 17, he was already a seasoned “road kid.” 

In his 70 plus years, Jim Christy asserted his freedom of spirit as a vagabond adventurer and true renaissance explorer of ideas as he took on multiple careers as a journalist, private eye, actor, and musician in over 50 countries around the globe. He is most renowned for his evocative narrative travelogues, novels, and poetry and stunning visual art.  Author Ian Cutler finds in Christy’s life, stories that are an essential link in the history of rebel talents; those rare souls who shift our perspective by choosing to live their lives outside of accepted cultural mores.

Ian Cutler interviews Christy and associates to assemble this fascinating and inspiring biography of a man who can genuinely be called the last of the Beat Generation.  Cutler is a philosopher specializing in the Cynic school and its context in modern life. His personal passion is documenting the lives of tramps, vagabonds, and hobos in the UK, Ireland and America.

Jim Christy: A Vagabond Life is the first title in Feral House’s Tramp Lit Series.

What is it about the desolate far North American wilderness that calls the intrepid traveler to uncover its sanctifying and deadly secrets? From Jack London (Call of the Wild) to Christopher McCandless (chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild) souls have found solace in the silent, frozen northern kingdom at the top of the world, the Ultima Thule. The forested flatlands give way to the frozen Rocky Mountains over millions of acres nominally in the dominion of both the United States and Canada and accessible by its 1532 mile shared umbilical cord?The Alcan Highway. Legendary vagabond, Jim Christy, a Philadelphia-born Canadian, travels this road throughout his life. First, as a young man in the early 1960s hungry for rugged adventure then revisiting the journey every few years both observing and reflecting on the growth of Northwest in the Rough Road to the North. Christy vividly describes the history of the indigenous people and the hearty (and often foolhardy) pioneers who built the Alcan Highway and opened the northern road. Christy’s lyrical text weaves fulsome magic about the siren call of the last unconquered land of North America.

Ladies’ man. Child soldier. Civil War hero. Egotist. Tramp. Drunkard. Published author. Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America tells the story of an American hobo entirely in his own words.

William ‘Roving Bill’ Aspinwall was many things and yet no lone descriptor does him justice. Born one of 23 siblings, married 5 times, wounded fighting for the Union in one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, kicked out of numerous jobs and soldiers’ homes for drunkenness, and having spent decades wandering as a penniless vagabond, Bill also kept up a 24-year correspondence with John James McCook, Professor of Modern Languages at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In so doing Bill provided the earliest and best account of life on the road by an American hobo.

Written between 1893 and 1917, Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America tells Bill’s story entirely in his own words. Describing experiences on the road, the people he meets, his dalliances with women and his memories of the Civil War, the letters are a rich and unique correspondence. Having been physically and mentally scarred at the 1843 Battle of Champion Hill, Bill details his lifelong battle with booze. He also gives first-hand accounts of men thrown out of work during the economic Panic of 1893, of wandering around the country as an itinerant umbrella-mender, of working in factories, farms and even a circus, as well as his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1903. Bill’s words are the real voice of a nineteenth-century hobo.

Author Biography: Dr. Owen Clayton is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln (UK). His first monograph, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915, came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2015. He is working on his second monograph, entitled Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: the Literature and Culture of American Transiency. He is the editor of Representing Homelessness, published as part of the Proceedings of the British Academy series (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Kathleen Phelan (nee Newton) was utterly unique; a female vagabond who embraced the freedom of the tramp lifestyle and philosophy. Like the infamous women explorers of the Victorian era, she traveled before as a single woman adventuring to every place on the planet funding her travels through canny bets on horseracing.
At age 26 in 1944, she met and married author and fellow tramp, Jim Phelan who introduced her to his literary circle. She tramped another 40+ years after he passed roaming from continent to continent, staying with Picasso in Spain, playing football with Pele in Brazil, and even telling her stories to the Shah of Iran. Her magnetism attracted friends all over the world with whom she corresponded and kept entertained with lively letters.
We meet Kathleen here in her never before published memoir of her travels with husband Jim and her return to the road after his passing in 1966.
Also included are personal correspondence and magazine articles written by Kathleen while on the road. Her nephew Liam Phelan, a senior journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, writes a moving and personal introduction.

“A damned good book, it is a book of timeless, illuminating truth …This book is one of a kind.

— Nick Tosches 

You Can’t Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in 1926, then reprinted in 1988 by Adam Parfrey’s Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs.

After its Amok Press edition went out of print, You Can’t Win found popularity once again with the AK Press edition.

Feral House’s new version takes this classic American narrative much further, including two remarkable nonfiction articles by Jack Black written for Harper’s Magazine in the 1920s. Extraordinary illustrations by Joe Coleman and new biographical revelations by Donald Kennison round out the new edition.