The Man Who Presumed

the long version

An illegitimate child, despised by his family, and thrown into a workhouse that only Dickens could properly describe, Henry Morton Stanley one day fought back against his brutal master, scaled the workhouse walls, and fled England. Successively he became a seaman, clerk, Confederate soldier, prisoner of war, explorer of the American frontier, self-styled journalist- and finder of Dr. Livingstone in the heart of Africa. This last achievement, immortally as it was to establish Stanley's fame, in reality amounted to far less than Stanley's future discoveries. More than any single man he geographized the rivers, falls and mountains of Africa, and opened the continent to Western civilization and commercialism. In so doing, be fought savages, disease, hunger, mutiny and sheer exhaustion to beggar anything in the annals of fiction. Stanley was an intensely lonely, shrewd, daring, arrogant, restless, inventive, humorless individual- and these qualities are all solidly displayed in the biography which fills in the portrait behind the phrase. A masculine market- primarily.