Overview

Travis Hugh Culley came to Chicago to work and live as an artist. He knew he'd have to struggle, but he found that his struggle meant more than hard work and a taste for poverty. In becoming a bike messenger, he found a sense of community and fulfillment and a brotherhood of like-minded individualists. He rode like a postmodern cowboy across the city's landscape; he passed like a shadow through its soaring office towers; he soared like a falcon through the roaring chaos of the multilayered streets of Chicago. He became an invisible man in society, yet at the same time its most intimate observer. In one of the most dangerous jobs on dry land, he found freedom. In The Immortal Class, Culley takes us in-side the heart and soul of an urban icon the bicycle messenger. In describing his own history and those of his peers, he evokes a classic American maverick, deeply woven into the fabric of society from the pits of squalor to the highest reaches of power and privilege yet always resolutely, exuberantly outside. And he celebrates a culture that eschews the motorized vehicle: the cult of human power. The Immortal Class, Culley's vivid evocation of a bicycle messenger's experience and philosophy, sheds a compelling light on the way human beings relate to one another and to the cities we inhabit. Travis Hugh Culley's voice is at once earthy and soaringly poetic a Gen-X Tom Joad at hyperspeed. The Immortal Class is a unique personal and political narrative of a cyclist's life on the street.

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9780375504280

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Reviews

Advance praise for The Immortal Class: Fast-paced, danger-filled, and thoroughly spellbinding...so rich, so unusual, and so aggressively written that readers will leave the book gasping for breath. This is a truly stunning book, completely original, a mixture of autobiography and philosophical treatise. Culley is a genuinely gifted writer, able to turn a seemingly ordinary bike ride into poetry in motion... We see the world through the eyes of a man hurtling through it at breakneck speed, and nothing we see, nothing we hear, is the way we expect it to be. One of the very best nonfiction books of recent years, and a treat for anyone gutsy enough to climb aboard. -- Booklist (starred review) Powerful and poetic. -- Library Journal (starred review) ÝAn exciting memoir...offering a rare inside view of a maligned but ubiquitous urban subculture...kinetic. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Travis Hugh Culley, a director and playwright, has worked as a bike messenger in Philadelphia and Chicago, where he currently lives.

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