The Last Great Road Bum
A Novel
359 pages · Released Aug 25, 2020 · Macmillan + ORM
Content report card
The Last Great Road Bum parent’s guide: what’s inside
LGBTQ+ themes
What it offers
Positive messages
Positive role models
Educational value
A note for parents
This is a literary novel for adult audiences based on a true story of an adventurer who dies fighting with Central American guerrillas. While the book explores idealism, courage, and the search for meaning, it contains war violence, references to drinking and drugs, and mature themes of death and political conflict. The narrative draws from real historical events and personal journals, making it more suitable for mature teens and adults interested in literary fiction and history.
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From the publisher
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 t... 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.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- New York Times reviewed
- Fiction, historical
- Fiction, biographical
- Fiction, action & adventure
- Fiction, historical, general
- Adventure and adventurers
- Wayfaring life
- FICTION / Literary
- FICTION / Historical / General
- FICTION / Hispanic & Latino
- Adventure stories
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ISBN 9780374720407 · Macmillan + ORM