You Can’t Win

New York: Macmillan Company, 1926. First Edition, first printing. Hardcover, 394pp., 8 x 5.5 inches. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. Minor silverfishing to cloth at extreme top and bottom edges of boards, mild acidification to endpapers, small spot to fore-edge of first few leaves. Dust jacket somewhat dust soiled with a few small nicks to extremities. A particularly presentable copy of the infamous autobiography of hobo and yeggman (safecracker) Jack Black. Originally published as a series of newspaper articles in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, about which novelist Harry Leon Wilson wrote, "As a human document it is of great value and stands far above anything of the sort I have encountered." The narrative follows Black's adventurous life during turn of the century America and focuses on the criminal underbelly and freight-hopping subcultures, where he encounters alcoholics, opium addicts, gamblers, prostitutes, and criminals. Black develops a personal "code of the streets" which influenced 20th century luminaries such as William Burroughs and Nelson Algren, among others.