The American Vagrant in Literature : Race, Work and Welfare

This book argues that the rapid development of anti-vagrancy laws in the late nineteenth century, which were written alongside widespread public fascination with ‘tramps’, facilitated a transatlantic dialogue between sources eager to modernize the state’s ability to describe, catalogue, and manage this roving population.Almost always depicted as white, solitary, and artistic, the tramp character was once a menacing threat to society only to disappear from the public eye by the postwar period.This book brings to light the often-surprising lines of influence between authors, sociologists, and government authorities who alike seized on the social panic around tramping in order to reimagine the relation of work to national citizenship.