Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Autobiography of a Thief

The Autobiography of a Thief

Hapgood, Hutchins

Paperback

Fiction AnthologiesGeneral SociologyGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1519340141
ISBN13: 9781519340146
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Nov 16 2015
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. I met the ex-pickpocket and burglar whose autobiography follows soon after his release from a third term in the penitentiary. For several weeks I was not particularly interested in him. He was full of a desire to publish in the newspapers an exposé of conditions obtaining in two of our state institutions, his motive seeming partly revenge and partly a very genuine feeling that he had come in contact with a systematic crime against humanity. But as I continued to see more of him, and learned much about his life, my interest grew; for I soon perceived that he not only had led a typical thief's life, but was also a man of more than common natural intelligence, with a gift of vigorous expression. With little schooling he had yet educated himself, mainly by means of the prison libraries, until he had a good and [10]individually expressed acquaintance with many of the English classics, and with some of the masterpieces of philosophy. That this ex-convict, when a boy on the East Side of New York City, should have taken to the graft seemed to me, as he talked about it, the most natural thing in the world. His parents were honest, but ignorant and poor. One of his brothers, a normal and honorable man, is a truck driver with a large family; and his relatives and honest friends in general belong to the most modest class of working people. The swell among them is another brother, who is a policeman; but Jim, the ex-convict, is by far the cleverest and most intelligent of the lot. I have often seen him and his family together, on Saturday nights, when the clan gathers in the truckman's house for a good time, and he is the life of the occasion, and admired by the others. Jim was an unusually energetic and ambitious boy, but the respectable people he knew did not appeal to his imagination. As he played on the [11]street, other boys pointed out to him the swell thief at the corner saloon, and told him tales of big robberies and exciting adventures, and the prizes of life seemed to him to lie along the path of crime. There was no one to teach him what constitutes real success, and he went in for crime with energy and enthusiasm.

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