James Oliver Curwood

Curwood was expelled from school, wandered, and talked his way into a newspaper job in Detroit without a diploma. By 1909 the Canadian government was paying him to travel the northern wilderness and write about it — a promotional arrangement that gave him, every year, several months in the country that became his entire subject. He published more than thirty novels of the far north; several were among the best-selling books in America, and Hollywood adapted them repeatedly.

He hunted for most of his life and then stopped. In his own account it was a bear that ended it — cornered, he expected to be killed and was not — and whatever the exact truth of the episode, the change in the books afterwards is unmistakable, and in 1927 he was appointed to the Michigan Conservation Commission.

The money built something odd and wonderful: a small stone château on the bank of the Shiawassee River in Owosso, Michigan, where he wrote in a turret. It still stands, as a museum.

That same year, fishing in Florida, something bit him through his boot. It was assumed to be a spider and never identified. The infection was lanced eight times over several months, and he died of it in August 1927, at forty-nine.