You Can't Win [1926] - Jack Black

"How I loathed the traitor, Bob Ford, one of the James boys gang, who shot Jesse when is back was turned, for a reward! How I rejoiced to read that Ford was almost lynched by friends and admirers of Jesse, and had to be locked in the strongest jail in the state to protect him from a mobbing. I finished the story entirely and wholly in sympathy with the James boys, and all other hunted, outlawed, and outraged men."

The author dedicated You Can't Win to "that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, 'Sticks' Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo, Wisconsin." In his foreword to the 1988 edition of You Can't Win, William S. Burroughs laments: "Where are the hobo jungles, the hop joints, the old rod-riding yeggs, where is Salt Chunk Mary? Where is the Johnson Family? As another thief, Francois Villon, said, 'Where are the snows of yesteryear?'"