New York: Macmillan, 1926. Hardcover first edition - The autobiography of a professional burglar and hobo, Jack Black, this book describes describes his days on the road and as a professional thief, convict and escaped prisoner (his mother died when he was 10, and after a few years in a convent school, he hit the road at 14, was in the dock for burglary before he was 20 and by age 25 he was expert house robber) but it is even more an indictment of the criminal justice system. While this book was influential to writers like William S. Burroughs (who mentioned it in "Junkie" and who also wrote the foreword to the 1988 trade paperback) and the Beats, it is perhaps even more relevant to us now with its discussion on how the prison system can be a force for good - the library in a Canadian prison - and also something which dehumanize prisoners - including his experiences of flogging in Canada,and being constrained by a strait jacket at Folsom. Foreword by Robert Herrick. xi, 394 pp.

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, (1973.) dj. Hardcover first edition - Glimpses of the lives of those living at a subsistence level in the United States in the early 1970's - a term that Hill and Davidson eventually used to include a way of life marked by 'principles of survival, originality, wholeness and independence.' Mostly told in the words of the individuals they interviewed in Maine, Georgia, California, Tennessee, Texas and places in between - from a couple who survive in Colorado by trapping, to hippies in Canyon, California, just outside Berkeley, to a ghetto in Plainfield, New Jersey, and the black residents, descendants of slaves, still living on Daufuskie Island in South Carolina. Farmers, trappers, schoolteachers, hobos, prisoners and hitchhikers - black, white and Native American - some living their life by choice, but most enduring what life dealt them, More than with words, their endurance and strenghth is most vividly shown in Davidson's striking black and whte photographs. Slightly oversized format, printed on heavy stock throughout, bound in coarse linen cloth. 186 p. ISBN: 0-030912237.