Product Description

Travis Hugh Culley went to Chicago to make his name in its thriving theater scene, yet found in his day job a sense of community and fulfillment—and a brotherhood of like-minded individualists—that he encountered nowhere else.

In The Immortal Class, Culley takes us inside the heart and soul of an American 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.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106261 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-13
• Released on: 2002-08-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.20" h x .75" w x 5.50" l, .50 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Puck, the scabby roommate from MTV's The Real World, remains the archetypal bike messenger: hyperkinetic, crass, hygienically challenged. But as Culley demonstrates in this exciting memoir of his years spent on two wheels, there's much more to the world of bike messengers than the stereotype. Many are artists, writers or revolutionariesACulley himself is all three. He got his start as a messenger in Chicago in the late 1990s by answering an ad in the newspaper after his small theater company went belly up. "The below-freezing winds burned my wrists and forearms," Culley says. "Thick bloodless cuts would open up along the lines of my fingerprints." He persevered and soon became (by his own description, at least) the fastest, best bike messenger in the city. Culley evokes the dangers of his profession, from careening taxis to yuppie road rage and broken bones. But there were also rewards, principally freedom from the cubicles of the corporate "wage slave." Culley's book is not just a memoir; it's also a political tract about the evils of the consumer economy and car-based capitalism. "The bicycle is a revolution," Culley says, "and I am using it like a hammer to change the world." Such statements may seem to many to veer toward the lunatic fringe, but to the bike messengers living on the edge of the system and constantly in danger from four-wheeled competitors, they'll make considerable sense. Offering a rare inside view of a maligned but ubiquitous urban subculture, this kinetic memoirAwhich is supported by a four-city author tour and ads in alternative weekliesAwill appeal to younger readers who admire Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and his magazine, McSweeney's. Agent, John Ware. (Mar. 20)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
When unpublished playwright and director Culley found it difficult to earn a living in the creative arts, he took a job as a bike messenger. This is the story of his adventures on the streets of Chicago. The author's descriptions are so vivid and apt that it is easy for the reader to imagine himself pedaling at breakneck speeds through crowded intersections and along sidewalks. More than a mere joy ride, this book is a window into the bizarre and cultlike world of the bike courier and, more significantly, a passionate plea for more sensible city planning. Culley calls for revitalizing public spaces that have been destroyed by our car culture and for developing urban designs that respect the needs and safety concerns of bicycle riders. This powerful and poetic work should establish Culley as an important new critical voice. Highly recommended for all libraries.
-DAndrew Brodie Smith, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Like Joe Quirk's novel The Ultimate Rush (1998), a thriller featuring a bike messenger as its hero, this memoir (written by a veteran bike messenger) is fast-paced, danger-filled, and thoroughly spellbinding. The author, a playwright and theater director, has more than once made ends meet by climbing on a bicycle and careening through the busy big-city streets, and his chronicle of the rather eccentric life of the bike messenger is 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. He takes us deep into the bike messenger's world, teaches us its unique language ("I'm out of the Lockbox, with a bag full o' rags"), and shows us the streets and back alleys and office buildings of Chicago in a way that makes them seem almost alien. 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. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved