author
Bertha Thompson
b. 1882
A hard-living, sharp-eyed voice from the margins of Depression-era America, remembered for a memoir of freight trains, skid rows, and survival. Her story has long fascinated readers because it sits right on the line between autobiography, oral history, and legend.
1 Audiobook
Rake Knitting Patterns
by Bertha Thompson
About the author
Best known as Box-Car Bertha, she is associated with Sister of the Road, first published in 1937. The book presents Bertha Thompson as a woman born in 1882 who drifted through boarding houses, anarchist circles, freight cars, city streets, and the precarious worlds of transient labor and sex work.
The memoir was told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman, the activist physician often called the "hobo doctor." Modern descriptions of the book often treat it as a pseudo-autobiographical work, and some later sources say the Bertha Thompson of the book may be partly a constructed or composite figure rather than a fully verifiable historical person. What is clear is that the book became an unusually vivid account of women on the road in the United States.
Whether read as memoir, collaboration, or a blurred mix of both, Sister of the Road endures because of its directness and its view of lives usually left out of official history. It later reached a wider audience when it loosely inspired Martin Scorsese's 1972 film Boxcar Bertha.