James Oliver Curwood

James Oliver Curwood was a literary fiction author from Owosso, Michigan. He was born to James Moran Curwood a cobbler and his wife Abigail Curwood. When his father’s business collapsed, the family relocated to Erie, County Ohio, where his father found a job picking stones on a farm. According to James, this was a critical time in his life as it helped build his character. It was also in Ohio that at the tender age of nine he began writing stories. When he turned thirteen, the family went back to the familiar setting of Owosso and the budding author would attend high school there until the tenth grade. But he found his classes so boring that he spent so much time outside of class than inside it that he was eventually expelled. While he never did complete high school, he took his exams and was admitted to study journalism at the English Department of the University of Michigan in 1998. Two years later, he got tired of studying and quit when he got a job on the “Detroit News-Tribune,” where he was a reporter. Earning eight dollars a week, he was charged with reporting on funerals. It was not long before he was out of a job for wrongly reporting a story. He then found a job working for a pharmaceutical company and was earning $50 a month, which he did for several years until the “Detroit News-Tribune” rehired him on $18 a week. He left the paper in 1907 having risen to the rank of assistant editor, to go become a professional author.