Emily Hahn was a woman ahead of her time, graced with a sense of
adventure and a gift for living. Born in St. Louis in 1905, she
crashed the
all-male precincts of the
University of
Wisconsin geology
department as an undergraduate, traveled alone to the Belgian Congo at age 25, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, bore the child of the head of the British Secret Service before World War II, and finally returned to New York to live and write in Greenwich Village. In this memoir, first published as essays in The New Yorker, Hahn writes vividly and amusingly about the people and places she came to know and love -- with an eye for the curious and a heart for the exotic.
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