Jack Black

(1871 - 1932)

Although he spent twenty-five years as a burglar and hobo in the American West, Jack Black had become a librarian for the San Francisco Call by the time his book You Can’t Win was first serialized in the paper. The book is said to have inspired Beat writers. “Confined by middle-class St. Louis mores,” wrote William S. Burroughs, “I was fascinated by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming houses, pool parlors, cat houses, and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles.”