Beggars of Life

After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police and reach Canada.

A bestseller in 1924, in this vivid piece of outlaw history Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting the cops. The author chose life on the road over a deadening job, through his teenage years of learning the ropes of the rails and living one meal to the next.