Speechification

John Steinbeck called them “the last free men”, and American mythology has a special place for the rail-riding hobo. This unencumbered hero, the happy-go-lucky bum, is an icon that occupies strange territory today, being so at odds with materialistic 21st century society.

Hobo Heaven (MP3), a documentary dredged up from the BBC World Service archives, tries to find out the truth behind these images of the itinerant boxcar rider - and goes to the National Hobo Convention (held every year in the tiny middle American town of Britt, Iowa) to see whether the hobo’s freedom is just a myth.

This entry was posted by by bobbie on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 11:49 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.