Various Books about Homelessness: London and Orwell vs Subways are for Sleeping and some more modern stuff

Of course, Jack London wrote the unremittingly grim but powerful People of the Abyss about poor Londoners at the turn of the 20th century and Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London 30 years later.

A very different sort of book is Subways are for Sleeping by Edmund G. Love. I just looked up his bio in Wikipedia and it is unclear how he became homeless but during the 1950s that happened to him. He wrote about the subject when I think homelessness was far more rare than it would become and perhaps because of this and post-war prosperity, he was able to cope with his situation far better than either of his predecessors (although it should be said that Jack London deliberately sought out the worst off and by 1903 was a successful writer — but the worst off he tells us of live unimaginably terrible lives — EG Love's life in 1950s Manhattan would have seemed like a paradise by comparison.

A book somewhere in between in terms of dire experience is Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner. Why his existence was not as terrible as those of Orwell may be a combination of weather (imagine being homeless in London during the winter) and the overall prosperity of the United States in the 1980s vs Depression-era London or for that matter, Depression-era anywhere in the USA. Jim Thompson in his Roughneck describes experiences just as bad, maybe worse come to think of it, than Orwell had in either of the two capitals. Like Edmund Love, the success of the very well-written account of living in Austin and Hollywood, periodically hitchhiking between those two very different places made Eighner financially secure for a while but he ended up homeless again eventually.

Just in writing the above, I conclude that even if you have nothing, it is better to live in a wealthy country.

I mention in closing not a book but a perhaps 15 page account of a single night without shelter in Manhattan. A winter's night. The author tells of the desperate struggle of the homeless to stay awake so they can remain inside Grand Central — the station was kept open throughout the night, maybe only during winter, for the benefit of the homeless. But the police enforce a grim rule which the author discovered when the rapping of a nightstick awoke him while he was sleeping sitting up on the marble floor of GCT: 3 strikes, you have to leave if they catch you sleeping thrice.

Orwell wrote something like, "It is a principle of the lives of the homeless: They will not be allowed to sleep at night."

I am interested in further discussion especially why the different authors had different experiences and whether these books still apply or describe, perhaps promisingly, things that could no longer happen although I live near two cities which have huge homeless encampments and other gruesome aspects that perhaps Orwell and London did not have to deal with. I guess the thing that would amaze Jack London and Orwell too is just how impossible it is to starve today in the United States. Jack London especially met people for whom starvation was a huge part of their calculations, part of their plans — how to find enough calories to be able to obtain and keep a job.

This I would definitely like to discuss and if I am wrong about starving in the USA, I am sure someone will tell me.