Afterwords: Jack London

Hobos and plagiarism.

A MASSACRE

When I started Jack London, my plan was to tell the story of two characters: Clothesline Bill, a hobo, and his dog Shep.

Because my writing project has an eight-year span, I thought it would be fun to have one recurring story throughout the 100 Stories. Roughly once a year, these two characters would re-emerge. The “Adventures of Shep & Clothesline Bill.”

With a twist.

Each of these recurring stories would be told by other tramps and hobos in boxcars, one story for each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s.

With the decades I’d have a vehicle to look at the passing of the hobo life (Depression-Era, post war, beatniks and dreamers, all the way up to the last overcast, heroin vestiges of boxcar life in the 1990s.)

Romance, America, Boxcars, Collapse...

But always the shifting legend of Shep and Clothesline Bill.

The last story might have boiled down to the two of them as a fleeting mention, no more relevant to the story’s speaker than “Annie Oakley” or “Wild Bill Hickok” is to me. Ja…