On the Road with Héctor Tobar
On a recent morning at his home in Los Angeles, Héctor Tobar, Pulitzer Prize–winning 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 relative unknown?,” he says.
