Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child, with a child’s imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have were those I got for myself.

—John Barleycorn, 1913

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean … where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn. … The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment.…

—The Road, 1905

Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old fighting thrills. But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed by a great sadness. He felt very old—centuries older than those careless, care-free young companions of his other days. He had traveled too far to go back.… He was too far removed. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him.

Martin Eden, 1909

Civilization has spread a veneer over the soft shelled animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer.… Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the female of his kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like an angry cat’s, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions.… Touch his silly vanity, which he exults into high-sounding pride, call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger’s claw, or an eagle’s talon, incarnate with desire to rip and destroy.

—The Call of the Wild, 1903

Marriage means less to man than to woman? Yes, by all means, at least to the normal man or woman. As surely as reproduction is woman’s peculiar function, and nutrition man’s, so surely does marriage sum up more to woman than to man. It becomes the whole life of the woman, while to the man it is rather an episode, rather a mere side to his many-sided life. Natural selection has made it so.

—The Kempton-Wace Letters, 1903

Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results. The way