From North Carolina to Southern California Without a Ticket and How I Did It

John PeeleProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
150K words
Chapters
15

Tags

English Originals Travel HitchhikingUnderclassPersonal StruggleAdventure JourneyUnderdog RiseRoad to FreedomBudget TravelDocumentary NarrativeSocial ObservationAmerican Travelogue

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.From North Carolina to Southern California Without a Ticket and How I Did ItAuthor: Peele, John (John R.),Language: English, Class: F206: United States local history: The South. South Atlantic States, Release Date: Apr 5, 2014

Editor's review

This is a short first-person documentary account of a long journey across America; the title itself states its core: traveling from North Carolina to Southern California without a ticket, and how the author did it. Its value lies not in offering an imitable travel guide but in preserving the real circumstances and survival strategies of lower-class travelers of a particular era, providing first-hand material for observing American local society, railway transportation, and the lives of a mobile population. The writing is plain and direct, the narrative has a personal adventure flavor, and the book is short, making it suitable as supplementary reading for understanding the local history of the American South and West. It should be read as a historical text rather than a behavioral guide, with attention to the socioeconomic background and transportation environment it reflects. The electronic edition comes from a public-domain project, making it easy to search and cite, and suitable for casual browsing by readers interested in American history, travel literature, and social history.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening and ending first to grasp the author's motivation and overall route, then revisit the details along the way.
  2. Compare the transportation in the book with today's travel, noting the differences of era and avoiding direct imitation.
  3. Look up place names on a map to build a sense of space and understand the actual scale of the interstate journey.
  4. For writing or research, excerpt passages on social circumstances and means of making a living to make thematic notes.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  11. 11
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FAQ

Is this book suitable as a travel guide reference? No. It records one person's experience of a long ticketless journey in a particular era, and the transportation environment and social rules differed greatly from today's. Readers should treat it as historical documentary and travel literature, not an operational travel guide.
What English level is needed to read this book? The original is in English with straightforward narration and uncomplicated sentences; a moderate English reading ability is enough to read it through. If unfamiliar with place names or period background, a map and background material can help comprehension.
What is the main historical value of this book? It records from an ordinary traveler's perspective the sights and means of making a living during interstate movement, supplementing official sources with details of lower-class life, and is suitable for observing local society and transportation in the American South and West at the time.

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About the author

John Peele Author

John Peele is an author about whom limited public information is available, with only one work held in the collection. His representative work is From North Carolina to Southern California Without a Ticket and How I Did It. Judging from the title, it is a first-person travel account describing how the author journeyed from North Carolina to Southern California without a ticket and the methods he used. The work has a clear personal-adventure character, dealing with long-distance travel and ticketless or hitchhiking-style journeys, and its narrative voice is direct and practical, presenting the sights and solutions of the road from the traveler's own perspective. Since his birth and death dates, nationality, and common categories are not recorded, it is difficult to assess his life and overall body of work further; his writing style and influence are mainly reflected in the subject matter and documentary narration of this single work.