Hobo Mimetics.

This article critically examines two recent scholarly works—Bryan Yazell's *The American Vagrant in Literature: Race, Work, and Welfare* (2023) and Owen Clayton's *Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940* (2023)—which explore the literary and cultural representations of transient figures such as hobos and tramps in Anglo-American contexts from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Both studies emphasize the performative and theatrical aspects of vagrancy, highlighting how identities of marginalized wanderers were constructed through acts of mimicry and masquerade, often entangled with racialized and class-based stereotypes. Yazell situates these portrayals within the development of welfare state policies and racialized social hierarchies, while Clayton foregrounds the diversity of transient experiences, including those of women, people of color, and queer individuals, and traces the lineage of countercultural itinerancy leading to the Beat Generation. The article also discusses how canonical works like Jack Kerouac's *On the Road* reflect and complicate these themes through racialized longing and performative identity, suggesting a critical awareness of the theatricality underlying countercultural self-fashioning.