Hobomania Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman and Other Agitators and Outsiders in 1920S/30s Chicago

From the 1910s through the Depression 30s, when Chicago was the undisputed hobo capital of the United States, a small north side neighborhood know as Towertown was the vital center of an extraordinary cultural/political ferment. It was home to Bughouse Square (the nation's most renowned outdoor free-speech center), Ben Reitman's Hobo College, and the fabulous Dil Pickle club, a highly unorthodox institution of higher learning that doubled as the craziest nightclub in the world. It was something like New York's Greenwich Village, but - thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW - much more working class, and more openly revolutionary. Frank O Becks Hobohemia contains a long time Towertowner's vivid reminiscences of this colorful, dynamic, creative and radical community that flourished for a generation despite constant onslaughts from the Red Squad, the Vice Squad, bourgeois journalists and fundamentalist bigots. Originally published in 1956, this handsome new edition contains a superb introduction from Franklin Rosemont, providing a historical overview of Chicago's working class counter-culture, and a biographical sketch of Beck. It also relates the book to earlier and later literature on the subject and fills in some gaps in the narrative.Beck, Frank O. is the author of 'Hobomania Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman and Other Agitators and Outsiders in 1920S/30s Chicago' with ISBN 9780882862514 and ISBN 0882862510.