ns of the contest. The first prize came to me, and
the second and third went to students of the Stanford and Berkeley
Universities.

My success in the San Francisco _Call_ competition seriously turned my
thoughts to writing, but my blood was still too hot for a settled
routine, so I practically deferred literature, beyond writing a little
gush for the _Call_, which that journal promptly rejected.

I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston, and
up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada, where I got
into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole tramping
experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had been impressed
by the dignity of labour, and, without having read Carlyle or Kipling, I
had formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was
everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a
hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. I was as
faithful a wage-slave as ever a capitalist exploited. In short, my
joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I
had fought my way from the open west, where men bucked big and the job
hunted the man, to the congested labour centres of the eastern states,
where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth,
and I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different
angle. I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the Social
Pit. I swore I would never again do a hard day's work with my body
except where absolutely compelled to, and I have been busy ever since
running away from hard bodily labour.

In my nineteenth year I returned to Oakland and started at the High
School, which ran the usual school magazine. This publication was a
weekly--no, I guess a monthly--one, and I wrote stories for it, very
little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences. I
remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of livelihood, and
leaving eventually because the strain was more than I could bear. At
this time my socialistic utterances had attracted considerable attention,
and I was known as the "Boy Socialist," a distinction that brought about
my arrest for street-talking. After leaving the High School, in three
months cramming by myself, I took the three years' work for that time and
entered the University of California. I hated to give up the hope of a
University education and worked in