1Alan Trachtenberg once described American Studies as the field of inquiry into the intellectual and cultural history of the United States with a “predominantly literary orientation” (Trachtenberg, 667). This traditional view of the discipline made use of literature to propose an explanation of social, cultural, and political phenomena. Byran Yazell’s The American Vagrant in Literature is an outstanding example of this approach, presenting a detailed account of the birth and evolution of the welfare state at the turn of the 20^th century using novels, autobiographies, travelogues and social essays of key authors of US and British vagrancy literature.

2The texts analysed in the four chapters of The American Vagrant follow a timeline set roughly between two major global recessions in 1873 and 1929. However, the analysis in the book goes beyond the chronological constraints of the different publications, providing insightful observations on the romanticisation of vagrancy in post-war literature—captured in the most famous vagrant book of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)— as well as an interpretation of late 20^th century neoliberal ideology.

3The subtitle, Race, Work and Welfare, is an indication of the two encompassing themes that Yazell scrutinises using literature as his companion: economy and race. Vagrant characters depicted in popular fiction and social literature allow the author to explore both the racial and economic implications of vagrancy, a broad topic that dominated public attention between the late 1800s and the early decades of 1900s. With the rise of the industrial society, vagrancy became a visible phenomenon that generated in the United States a “tramp scare.” This fear reflected the new values and anxieties of a fast-evolving society. In the early years of the scare, US progressive reformers strove to modernise the state’s legal institutions to face the new social challenge. They took inspiration from European vagrancy laws, and ignited the process that would later take to the creation of the welfare state. This book offers a formidable account of how the welfare state came to be on both sides of the Atlantic and how literature witnessed and participated in its creation.

4On this latter aspect, the one text that stands out in Yazell’s study is George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) in chapter 3. The book is described as “the best and last canonical example” (106) of undercover tramping studies that reported the physical exploitation and degradation of the vagrant caused by the state in interwar Britain (Yazell examines other key texts in that canon from Josiah Flynt, W.H. Davies and Jack London). Orwell’s work is equated to Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of labourers’ mistreatment in Modern Times (1936) and observed through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s “slow death” precarity theory about the deliberate physical burning out of specific social groups or populations. In this section of the book, Yazell offers a compelling bridge between Orwell’s account of early welfare and the demise of welfare caused by neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards (112-121).

5Among the several reflections on the functioning of the modern industrial economic system, we find another fine moment in the book. That is, the reading that Yazell proposes of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880) in chapter 1. The analysis of this classic travel-writing text offers a refreshing opinion on the ideology and politics that changed American society and steered modernisation in the Gilded Age. The customary interpretation of the text repeatedly implied Twain’s nostalgia for a romantic pre-modern Europe in contrast with his fast-modernising home country in which tramping symbolised pre-modern living. Against this conventional criticism, Yazell reads Twain’s classic as an appeal to “productive work and denigration of idleness” that speaks to US middle-class readers. However, Twain flicks common perceptions to praise the productivity of the tramp against the idleness of the affluent American. In Yazell’s interpretation, Twain’s work links US and Europe as players in the same modern system of cultural and economic exchange, wherein Europe is the producer and the US is the consumer, tourism being the product. Twain is concerned with the figure of the American tourist as a “vacuum,” a wealthy idle, wasteful and indulgent member of society. In contrast, the vagrant is a potential productive member of society, if only that society could grasp his worth. Regrettably, the modern economic system rewards the consumer and the tourist is a consumer of (European) culture and luxury, while the tramp is incapable of consuming those expensive products. While a new ideology in the 1870s blames poverty as moral failing, entailing that “the poor and working class must be made accountable for the public good” (38), Twain rehabilitates the human value of the tramp, “arbiter of productive Americans rather than an icon of criminality” (43). In doing so, the text discards the idea of the tramp as an antagonist of modernity and presents the tramp as indeed a construct of modernity that projects a new anxiety. For Twain, the tramp holds an intrinsic social usefulness that is squandered in the consumer society. By equating tramping with literary art (and diplomacy!), the writer recognizes the industriousness of the tramp that the modern economy rejects. This explanation of A Tramp Abroad resonates with current questions of neoliberal ideology, unemployment, economic inequality and postwork society.

6In parallel with his reflections on economic questions, Yazell disentangles the other major theme of the book, race. The author takes the reader into the process that spanned the years from Twain to Kerouac of slow institutionalisation of tramping as a phenomenon that involves white people. Seen as a dangerous practice in the 1870s, white mobility generated a clash between the young institutions of the industrialised state and the vagrant. The vagrant posed a threat to the authority of the state, depositary of new social and economic values. The problem was addressed through laws and policies that over the decades would generate a welfare system that was able to tame and transform the vagrant into a labourer. While Orwell observed the negative effects on the vagrants’ health during the nascent welfare in Britain’s interwar period, John Steinbeck’s novels witnessed the moment in which white people in the US were dislocated to where they could best serve the state. After the war, the long effort to stop the tramping phenomenon was successfully completed and white people could be largely identified in the 1950s with the so-called working and middle-classes, with the exceptions of those individuals perceived and marginalised as underserving poor, entirely responsible for their indigence. The post-war era is therefore a time when “the state in effect erased the threat of white vagrancy and displaced its disruptive qualities onto people of colour” (162). This is best identified in literature through the “envious equation of blackness with danger” (163) by Kerouac who lamented the conformity imposed by whiteness in an enduring vagrancy literature based on a racialised idea of tramping, well after the end of the tramp scare and anti-vagrancy laws in the US.

7The racial theme is predominant especially in chapter 2 in which three early 20^th century texts (Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, 1903, W.H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, 1908 and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, 1901) are read against Michel Foucault’s study of the rise of state power and its goal to uphold racial purity. Masculine, brave, resourceful white vagrants populated a literature entrenched in the myth of US and white exceptionalism that demanded the inclusion of the “super-tramp,” a royal version of the vagrant, into the fold of mainstream society, expanding on Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.

8The two macro themes of the book are then merged flawlessly in chapter 4 with the study of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a book that like no others contributed to political activism and social policy implementation, expanding the vagrant subject from the individual to the family in what was the last great period of US white vagrancy.

9The summary provided here is just an example of some of the achievements of this engaging book that elevates the use of literature to a compelling instrument for political, economic, social and cultural analysis. This is a highly recommended publication for the readers of the European Journal of American Studies. Yazell with The American Vagrant in Literature opens a treasure trove of ideas and sources, underpinned by a wide-ranging cultural history and ingenious interdisciplinary associations, enjoyable by the largest academic readership.