Peter David Edstrom

[3] He returned to Sweden after a hobo's journey started in a freight train car on July 29, 1894, and ended (after a wage earner's trip across the Atlantic) in Stockholm where he supported himself during his studies at the Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and Royal Swedish Academy of Arts.

In Florence, he created the sculptures Caliban (1900), Sphinx (1900), Lucifer (1902),[5] The Cry of Poverty (1903), Despair (1904), and Pride (1904).

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Ottumwa, featuring four reliefs on a shaft topped with a large eagle.

Rupert Hughes in his foreword to the book "aver[ed]" Edstrom's self-story to be "garrulous and preposterous in its account of a man of huge appetites and colossal conceptions.

"[8] Edstrom died in Los Angeles, after two marriages: "one to the daughter of a Swedish official, who wore men's attire"; and another to Cora Downer, who Gertrude Stein described as the bride of "the fat Swedish sculptor who married the head of the Christian Science Church in Paris and destroyed her.