O

n a recent morning at his

home in Los Angeles, Héctor

Tobar, Pulitzer Prize–win-

ning journalist and expert

chronicler of the Latino

experience, sat down with a bowl of

oatmeal he’d whipped up for breakfast

after dropping his daughter off at

school. He wants to talk about the day

he encountered the strange, true story

of Joe Sanderson, a 20th-century thrill

seeker and failed novelist from Urbana,

Ill., who is the subject of Tobar’s epic

new novel, The Last Great Road Bum,

due out in June from MCD.

Sanderson traveled the world in the

1960s and ’70s, then became a guerilla

fighter in the Salvadoran Civil War. So

what drew Tobar to a man who is a rela-

tive unknown? “I want people to think

of Joe Sanderson as one of the great

American adventurers of his time—as

someone who’s as worthy of being

remembered as Jack Kerouac,” he says.

Tobar has written two other novels,

The Tattooed Soldier and The Barbarian

Nurseries, and two nonfiction works:

Translation Nation, in which the author

chronicles his own family history and

travels across the United States to gather

stories about the Latino experience, and

Deep Down Dark, an account of the 2010

mining disaster in Copiapó, Chile.

Before he wrote Deep Down Dark, which

spent seven weeks on the New York Times

bestseller list, he was already thinking

about Sanderson, whom he calls “an

American Che Guevara,” whom he

learned about while working in Mexico.

In 2008, Tobar was working as the

In his new novel, Héctor Tobar chronicles the life of a failed writer

who became “an American Che Guevera”

BY ELAINE SZEWCZYK

© patrice normand, agence opale