Episodes Before Thirty was published by Cassell in 1923. It is Blackwood’s autobiography covering his life from childhood through his twenties — years spent in a series of improbable adventures that read like fiction: he was sent to a Moravian school in Germany, studied agriculture in Canada (failing at a dried-milk farming venture), moved to New York where he worked as a journalist, model, and bartender while living in near-destitution, was cheated by a partner, and spent periods sleeping rough in city parks.
The memoir is valuable for understanding where Blackwood’s fiction came from: his experiences in the Canadian wilderness (the source of “The Wendigo” and much else), his encounter with genuine poverty and loneliness in New York (which gave him sympathy for the marginal and outcast), and above all his childhood experiences in nature — the moments of mystical union with landscape that he would spend his career trying to recapture in prose.
The writing is characteristically vivid: Blackwood was as gifted a prose stylist in memoir as in fiction, and the episodes he relates — freezing nights on the Canadian prairies, hunger in New York tenements, encounters with charlatans and mystics — are told with the narrative skill of a born storyteller. The book reveals that Blackwood’s life was itself material for supernatural fiction: he lived at the edges of ordinary experience and wrote from that margin.
Collecting Episodes Before Thirty
First edition (Cassell, London, 1923): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $50–$150
- Important autobiography for collectors of weird fiction