Harry A. Franck

Harry Alverson Franck, better known as Harry A. Franck (29 June 1881 – 18 April 1962) was an American travel writer during the first half of the 20th century.

Harry Alverson Franck was born on June 29, 1881 in Munger, Michigan, the eldest of three children of the blacksmith Charles Adolph Franck (1856–1933) and Lillie Evelyn Wilsey (1861–1955), herself the daughter of a local blacksmith, Peter Alverson Wilsey (1827–1915), and his wife Almira Lincoln Graham (1829–1907). Harry's father Charles was born in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Germany, but at less than a year old came to the United States with his elder sister and his parents, Heinrich Franck (1823–1877) and Wilhelmina Christina Magdalena Kort (1829–1912), who remained in contact with family in Schwerin; in the course of his travels, Harry visited these relatives at least twice, detailing these visits in Vagabonding Through Changing Germany, but identifying his relatives only as "a family distantly related to my own".

In the summer of 1900, following his freshman year at the University of Michigan, Harry Franck set out with only $3.18 in his pocket to see Europe. He worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat, visited England and France, and got back to Ann Arbor two weeks after classes had started. While an undergraduate, he bet a fellow student that he could travel around the world without money, and after a year of teaching, proceeded to do so. He spent sixteen months circling the globe, working to earn money along the way and performing feats such as walking across the Malay peninsula. His book, A Vagabond Journey Around the World (1910) sold well enough to encourage him to continue his travels, following five years teaching in two private schools and in the Springfield, Massachusetts Technical High School.

Franck had many adventures, not all of them pleasant, but all described in his plain, somewhat sarcastic style, which was the antithesis of the highly romantic prose of other popular travel writers, such as Richard Halliburton. All his books except Winter Journey Through the Ninth (see below), are out of print, but some are now in the public domain and freely available online, and all are readily available secondhand.

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