Best of
Biography

1913

Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals


Robert Falcon Scott - 1913
    On board was an international team of explorers led by Robert Falcon Scott, a man determined to be the first to reach the South Pole. A year and a half later, Scott and three members of his team died during a brutal blizzard. Their dream of reaching the Pole first had already been dashed by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and now on their return trip--slowed by ill health and bad weather--Scott's party found themselves trapped in a tent without sufficient provisions, while the wind howled endlessly outside. Even in his final hours, Scott found the strength to continue the journal he'd started at the beginning of his adventures; the diary was found beside his frozen body.Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals is the explorer's detailed account of his time in Antarctica. The team's daily progress towards their final goal is recorded in Scott's vivid, personal narrative, as well as his impressions of the harsh conditions, the stark beauty of the tundra, and his own increasingly desperate ambition to beat his rivals to the Pole. Shortly before he died, Scott wrote: "Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." Robert Falcon Scott and his men died, but their story lives on in his journals.

My Childhood


Maxim Gorky - 1913
    After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy. My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary charm and poignancy and without bitterness. Of all Gorky's books this is the one that made him 'the father of Russian literature'.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth


John Muir - 1913
    Muir recounts in vivid detail the three worlds of his early life: his first eleven years in Scotland; the years 1849–1860 in the central Wisconsin wilderness; and two-and-a-half most inventive years at the University of Wisconsin during that institution’s infancy.

John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs


Jack London - 1913
    London offers acute generalizations on Barleycorn together with a close narrative of his own drinking career, which was heroic in scale. It is, however, as an exercise in autobiography that his book principally attracts the modern reader. London's life was tragically short but packed with episode and adventure. In John Barleycorn he records his early hardships in Oakland, his experiences as oyster pirate, deep-sea sealer, hobo, Yukon goldminer, student, drop-out, and - ultimately - best-selling author. Long neglected by London partisans (who wish he had never written it) and used against him by critics who would see him as a self-confessed drunk, John Barleycorn deserves to be celebrated for what it is: a classic of American autobiography.

Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision


Helen Keller - 1913
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Lineage, Life And Labors Of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot


Austin Craig - 1913
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Early Days on the Yukon: The Story of Its Gold Finds (1913)


William Ogilvie - 1913
    No man was better fitted to write of this wild and rich, rugged and bleak, yet beautiful region than was its explorer and path-finder, its pioneer writer, the creator of its institutions and moulder of its early government, the late William Ogilvie. The book has stirring interest; it is history in the making and the basis of future historical writing as to this vast lone land of the Arctic. It but touches the fringe of the time when men reached out for what was to be a hundred millions worth of gold; when that wonderful Camp was constituted in which good and evil developed side by side, and the strongest and meanest of mankind were tested in the sternest of the world ’s wars between humanity and nature. The book leads up to this period, shows the country in plain but effective narrative, and provides a valuable record of pioneer conditions and events.Over 100 years ago Yukon was an uninhabited, uncharted, unknown, and even unnamed land, by 1910 it sheltere a vigorous population, in numerous, prosperous towns and under a well-organized stable government. No such region has ever sprung into existence more suddenly or developed so rapidly with as little waste of wealth, energy, and human life. And this was due primarily to the mental strength, sound judgment, and fine moral fiber of William Ogilvie. Of Scotch Irish stock, born and educated in Ottawa, he took up his work of Dominion surveyor in the new lands of the Northwest Territory. His surveys on the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers, extending in a single trip alone nearly three thousand miles, yielded the first accurate information of a country never before traversed by the foot of a white man. He made the first preliminary survey of the international boundary between Alaska and Canada and so accurately that the latest survey found the line at the Yukon only a few score yards from where it ought to be.Ogilvie was made the first commissioner of Yukon Territory in 1896. He had to select his aids and advisers, to create a system of laws, and to administer them. He established schools as well as courts, organized a postal service, adjusted public grievances, created public sentiment, and made a strong and orderly state out of a wilderness and a mob of men seeking gold.It is the story of these days that he tells in this work with a directness and unaffected simplicity that conceals from the casual reader the great part he played himself. As a tale of the days when men fought with the wilderness for wealth the book is full of interest, overflowing with anecdote in which humor and death run side by side. It is invaluable as the record of an accurate observer, a keen judge of men, a retentive memory, and above all a strong leader in stormy times. For the history of the Northwest he has done a great service in recording what would otherwise have been irrevocably lost. Mr. Ogilvie's book must always be an indispensable document in any study of the social or political history of the Klondike. CONTENTS I. COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL DISTINCTIONS OF AMERICAN TERRITORY OF ALASKA AND THE YUKON TERRITORY OF CANADA II. BOUNDARY MATTERS III. STORY OF ATTEMPTED CRIME AND THE SWIFT JUSTICE WHICH FOLLOWED IT IV. REMARKS ON MR. OGILVIE'S SURVEY V. TRADING AND TRADING POSTS ON THE RIVER VI. GOLD DISCOVERIES AND MINING VII. FIRST GOLD SENT OUT VIII. DISCOVERY OF THE KLONDIKE IX. MR. OGILVIE'S VISIT TO THE COUNTRY IN 1887-8 AND OBSERVATIONS MADE THEN X. WINTER WORK IN 1895-6 XI. WORK DONE ON THE CREEKS BY MR. OGILVIE XII. LOCAL EXCITEMENT AS WEALTH OF KLONDIKE WAS REVEALED XIII. EXPERIENCES IN CAMP AND ON RIVER XIV.

Reminiscences of School Life and Hints on Teaching


Fanny Jackson Coppin - 1913
    Born into slavery, Coppin was the second African-American woman to graduate from Oberlin College. A noted classical scholar, she devoted her life to the education of African-American children. This volume, originally published posthumously in 1913, is a four-part work composed of an autobiographical sketch (including an account of her classical studies at Oberlin and her role as teacher and first black woman principal of a high school - the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia); an essay setting forth her views and theories on education; a travelogue on her journeys to England and South Africa; and a description of her work as a missionary and educational activist in South Africa.