By Autumn R. Neal

My last post was about the main text for the Edgar Snow Project website. There was one aspect of it that I didn’t address last time that is pretty important, the two books I used as references. In 1958, Snow published his memoir, Journey to the Beginning. If you haven’t read this book I highly recommend it. It flows well and is so captivating that instead of scanning for information I would catch myself reading chapter after chapter. I’m also pretty sure that Snow embellished some stories but, hey, all authors do that right? It’s what makes journalism so interesting. The only issue is that the memoir is not in order and Snow didn’t write dates to go along with his stories. In the process of rewriting, I was trying to figure out how to order certain events and the book may have made that harder.

I bought this used copy from Amazon that had the original sales receipt from Liberty Book Club, New York City. It sold for $3.86.

The second book I used is a biography on Snow by John Hamilton. This book was really helpful because it covered facts that Snow did not address in his memoir, such as his early life, as well as events that occurred after Journey to the Beginning. Hamilton’s book sometimes focuses on topics that weren’t relevant for this project. It was challenging trying to combine the information from the entertaining memoir and the serious biography into an accessible but professional narrative. I think that the site text is unique though because of the mixture of information from these two books and the information gathered from the archives.