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.
