B. Traven (Photo by ullstein bild via Getty Images / Illustration by Kevin Lozano)
In England, Germany, the U.S.A., everywhere it is the police who do the whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who sit smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks the table, overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments. B. Traven, The Cotton-Pickers
Vorwärts, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in 1925. Originally titled
Die Baumwollpflücker (
Der Wobbly (
The Wobbly), after the popular appellation for members of the radical American syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World, in its initial book printing in 1926. The novel follows Gerard Gales, an unemployed, itinerant American in Mexico who peripatetically moves from cotton picking to drilling in the oil fields to baking to driving cattle. Throughout, Traven’s narrator barely manages to stay ahead of total immiseration. The only jobs to be had are thos