Solitary Comrade

Hedrick examines London's inner life, primarily as it is revealed in his art, to discover the man concealed beneath the public persona. Although London was wealthy, famous, and one of the last great self-made men in America, Hedrick shows that he was always torn by his troubled relationship to his lower-class origins. He lived in painful awareness of the contradictions between the man's world of the lower classes--at the workplace, on the road, and in prison--and the woman's world of the middle class in which he took refuge.