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You Can’t Win

Jack Black

  • History
  • Book language: English
  • 279 pages

You Can’t Win is Jack Black’s memoir of life as a hobo and professional thief in early twentieth-century America. It moves from rail lines and hobo camps to prisons and the criminal underworld, told with plain, unsentimental honesty. Its firsthand view of a vanished margin of American life makes it worth hearing.

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Text source: standardebooks.org · The work is in the public domain.

Opening of the book

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks”

Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back —under the bridge —at Baraboo, Wisconsin.

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Contents

  1. Acknowledgments
  2. Foreword

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