Episodes Before Thirty

Before Algernon Blackwood became the acknowledged master of the ghost story, he spent his first thirty years tumbling through life with almost comic misfortune. This autobiography traces his circuitous path from privileged British youth to penniless adventurer in Canada and New York, where he tried his hand at everything and failed at most of it. He slept on park benches, shared vermin-infested tenements with friends who betrayed him and strangers who saved him, reported on the criminal machinery of Tammany Hall from inside its newsroom, and wandered into the wilderness when the city crushed him. Blackwood writes with unsettling clarity about the desperate characters he encountered, the schemes that ruined him, and the grinding poverty that nearly broke him. Yet two things refused to abandon him: his love of nature and his compulsion to write. These became his lifeline, pulling him back to England where he would eventually transform his suffering into some of the most disturbing supernatural fiction ever written. This is a bracing, unsentimental tale of survival and reinvention.