Author Randy Rhody, poet of the Mimeograph Revolution, brings you a roadside view of the radical Sixties without the myths, in his memoir The Hippie Hitchhiker from Nebraska.
In the year that 382,000 young Americans are drafted to serve in an unjust war, a teenager on the run seeks a mystic’s higher understanding, drifting without a safety net through subterranean America for 22,000 reckless miles.
Overview - Honor student Randy Rhody is estranged from family at seventeen, too poor to stay in college at eighteen, and like a defector from Plato’s Cave, distrusts conventional dogma and authority.
He hitchhikes from Nebraska to find Cleveland’s legendary mimeo revolution publisher, and himself becomes newsworthy as a vagabond poet. Momentum carries him onward, a lone teenage mendicant.
He finds a desperate underside of the Sixties while hitchhiking from city to city, sleeping in communal crash pads,
asking for spare change, and crossing paths with people and events destined to become historical milestones. It's a walkabout on the open road stretching from Haight-Ashbury to the Lower East Side in a story arc of loss, exile, and self-reliance.
But while he searches for peace of mind and a place to belong, neither the establishment nor the counterculture prepare him for a transforming insight that fulfills his quest for knowledge beyond words—one that he struggles to comprehend.
travel map 1966-1967
comparative timeline 1966-1969
personae the famous, the notorious, the complete unknowns encountered in The Hippie Hitchhiker from Nebraska
photo blog a visual supplement to The Hippie Hitchhiker from Nebraska
