Harry A. Franck

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.

He spent sixteen months circling the globe, working to earn money along the way and performing feats such as walking across the Malay peninsula.

Franck had many adventures, not all of them pleasant, but all described in his plain, somewhat sardonic style, which was the antithesis of the highly romantic prose of other popular travel writers, such as Richard Halliburton.

His books intimately recorded life as it was lived in the societies he visited, at a time when many of them were changing rapidly under the influence of industrialization.

His unconscious remarks and use of words that nowadays are unacceptable in civilised speech are mainly of interest in revealing the differences between the conventions of the day and those of say, the late 20th century.

"[3] In the same book he reported on a visit to the northern Chinese city of Harbin, which at the time of writing (1923) contained a large population of refugee Russian aristocracy.

Harry Franck married Rachel Latta (1892–1986), a Philadelphian working as a secretary to a correspondent and a volunteer in the US army hospital whom he met in Paris, in 1919.

The couple had five children, all born in different places, but made their home life in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Harry Franck died of a stroke in 1962.