LONESOME TRAVELER

Broadly speaking, Lonesome Traveler, in form, is a series of impressionistic essays on the author's travels mainly around the U.S. There are accounts of his sojourn in San Pedro and Long Beach, Calif, waiting to get on a ship; riding by bus to Mexico — to the bullfights, out of season — on pot; working as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific R.R.; in the galley of a ship sailing down the Pacific coast to the Mississippi; and his Big Trip to Europe —Tangier, Morocco, Paris, London. There are some New York scenes —jazz spots, parties, bars — and fortunately, his mother's apartment in Jamaica, Long Island, where he could retreat "just to sleep and write". And by contrast he describes life as a fire lookout in a northwest national forest. There's a final essay on the hobo — The Vanishing 'American To his fans and to those who might not be repelled by his frenetic anti-style this might be of intermittent interest.