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Summary
Summary
One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly 's Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020 . Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville's Favorite Books of 2020.
In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.
Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum," an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum .
A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador--a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism.
The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live--a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.
Author Notes
Héctor Tobar was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. He received an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine and became a reporter with the Los Angeles Times in the 1980's. Along with a team of writers, he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the L.A. riots in 1992.
He has written both fiction and non-fiction works. His novels include The Tattooed Soldier and The Barbarian Nurseries, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction. His non-fiction works include Translation Nation and Deep Down Dark.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tobar's stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws from the unbelievable true story of Joe Sanderson, a peripatetic would-be-writer who left a comfortable existence in Urbana, Ill., in order to travel the world in search of material for a great American novel. Instead, he found romance, danger, and the dark heart of the mid-20th century. After falling in love with life on the road in 1960 as a high school senior traveling alone in Mexico City, Joe hitchhikes his way across Jamaica, narrowly escaping a government crackdown on the Rastas he'd fallen in with. Then it's on to South America, where Joe embraces the life of a vagabond before setting out again and experiencing historical events across the globe. In Saigon, he surveys the aftermath of the Tet Offensive; and in Biafra, he crisscrosses war zones in emulation of his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. All the while, Joe begins writing and occasionally finishes unpublishable novels with titles like The Prince of Castaways, Caledonia, and The Silver Triangle. Working from a massive archive of Sanderson's letters, journals, and doomed forays into fiction, Tobar discovers the real story in Joe's life, following him into his fateful decision to join the paramilitary rebels in El Salvador. Throughout, Joe appears in footnotes to dispute the veracity of the account of Tobar, the "Guatemalan dude" who fictionalized his remarkable life. No matter; Tobar brilliantly succeeds in capturing Joe's guileless yearning for adventure through high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry. Tobar's wild ride achieves a version of Kerouac for a new age. (June)
Booklist Review
When Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, a son of the middle class, was a teenager, he met a British adventurer who had circumnavigated the globe solo; what a great thing it would be, Joe thought, if he could do the same. To think was to act, for several years later he became the quintessential road bum and hitchhiker, following his thumb through 70 countries around the world. The vividly realized particulars of his restless journeys are offered in Tobar's remarkable novelization of Sanderson's real life, his adventures and misadventures. The book divides naturally into two sections, the first detailing the 20 years of his wanderings; the second describing his arrival in El Salvador, a country in the midst of a revolution, where he persuaded the rebels to let him join them, and so the legend of Lucas (Sanderson's nom de guerre) began. It would end heartbreakingly two years later with Sanderson's death in 1982, at 39, in combat. Why his wanderlust? In part, it was due to his determination to have enough experiences to enable him to write the great American novel, an ambition that remained unrealized. And yet, his life itself has inspired what is inarguably a great novel, a tribute to him that is beautifully written and spectacularly imagined. Tobar writes that it took him 11 years to complete this wonderful book. Readers will rejoice that he persisted.
Library Journal Review
An award-winning journalist (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free) and novelist (The Barbarian Nurseries), Tobar was writing for the Los Angeles Times in 2008 when he uncovered the story of Joe Sanderson, an Illinois kid who left his home in the 1960s to wander the globe and write a great novel. Here, Tobar weaves Sanderson's diaries and letters into a novel about his life. Bouncing from country to country, Joe travels through war zones in Vietnam and joins the Red Cross in Biafra while remaining connected to his family in Urbana through letters and postcards. However, when Joe joins the guerrilla rebels in the Salvadoran civil war, his journey transforms from experiential to immersive, and his tether to his family, country, and ultimate objective loosens. VERDICT Tobar conjures the narrative spirit of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums in juxtaposing the seeming placidity of the American Midwest and a life in search of truth and authenticity. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY