Jack Black (author)

Jack Black (1871–1932) was a Canadian and American hobo and burglar. Black is best known for his autobiography You Can't Win (Macmillan, 1926), describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight, but it is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years (fifteen of which were spent in various prisons in Canada and the United States) as a travelling criminal, and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium addict. He gained fame as a prison reformer, writer, and playwright. He disappeared in 1932 in a likely suicide.

Life
Black was born in 1871 in New Westminster, British Columbia, he was raised from infancy in the U.S. state of Missouri in the town of Maysville and eventually Kansas City. Aside from this, Jack Black is an essentially anonymous figure; even his actual name is uncertain. In his autobiographical book, he quotes his father as calling him "John," of which Jack is often a nickname. Some 1904 news articles name him as Jack Black, alias Tom Callahan, while a 1912 newspaper article names him Thomas Callaghan, alias Jack Black, and another gives his alias as Harry Klein. One of his nicknames among criminals was Blacky.

After his last spell in prison, Black became friends with wealthy patron Fremont Older and worked for his newspaper The San Francisco Call. Black wrote his autobiography with Rose Wilder Lane and eventually composed essays and lectured throughout the country on prison reform. He was also rumored to have received a stipend of $150 a week to draft a screenplay titled Salt Chunk Mary with co-author Bessie Beatty, based around the vagabond ally and fence of the same name in You Can't Win. The play flopped, although he was able to attain some amount of popularity, which subsided quickly.

His philosophy on life was especially influential to William S. Burroughs, who associated with similar characters in his early adulthood. He also mirrored the style of You Can't Win with his first published book, Junkie. In his foreword to the 1988 edition of You Can't Win (reproduced in a 2000 edition), Burroughs wrote:

"I first read You Can't Win in 1926, in an edition bound in red cardboard. Stultified and confined by middle-class St. Louis mores, I was fascinated by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming houses, pool parlors, cat houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles. I learned about the Johnson Family of good bums and thieves, with a code of conduct that made more sense to me than the arbitrary, hypocritical rules that were taken for granted as being 'right' by my peers."

Disappearance
He disappeared in 1932 and is believed to have committed suicide by drowning, as he reportedly told his friends that if life got too grim, he would row out into New York Harbor and, with weights tied to his feet, drop overboard. In You Can't Win Black describes this state of mind as being "ready for the river".

Quoted excerpts about Black and his memoir
"You Can't Win is (...) an autobiography of a reformed criminal. It points a sufficiently obvious moral, yet one that too many at the present day are prone to forget. A deeper question is also raised, and that is regarding the validity of the practical aims and ideals of the majority of people in our modern world."

- The Builder Magazine, January 1927 – Volume XIII – Number 1

"Jamboree author Black is a graduate of five penitentiaries, was pried loose from a 25-year prison term and helped to overcome his addiction to narcotics by mustachioed Editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. This play is a dramatization of Black's book You Can't Win. "Every character in this play is drawn from the personal experiences of Jack Black during his years as a criminal or as a prisoner. The types are real and these people actually lived."

- Time magazine, Dec. 5, 1932

"Jack had been a sort of a reign of terror...just before the earthquake and fire of 1906. Every crime committed in San Francisco during the first three months of that year was ascribed to Jack Black."

- R.L. Duffus, The Tower of Jewels

"He returned to New York and Fremont thought Jack did what he always said any down-and-outer should do, "fill his pockets with rocks and take a header into the bay.""

- Mrs. Cora Fremont Older