where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole
tramping experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had
been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read
Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put
theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification
and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done
would be inconceivable to you. I was as faithful a wage-slave as
ever a capitalist exploited. In short, my joyous individualism was
dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I had fought my way
from the open west, where men bucked big and the job hunted the man,
to the congested labour centres of the eastern states, where men
were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth, and
I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different
angle. I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the
Social Pit. I swore I would never again do a hard day's work with
my body except where absolutely compelled to, and I have been busy
ever since running away from hard bodily labour.

In my nineteenth year I returned to Oakland and started at the High
School, which ran the usual school magazine. This publication was a
weekly--no, I guess a monthly--one, and I wrote stories for it, very
little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences.
I remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of
livelihood, and leaving eventually because the strain was more than
I could bear. At this time my socialistic utterances had attracted
considerable attention, and I was known as the "Boy Socialist," a
distinction that brought about my arrest for street-talking. After
leaving the High School, in three months cramming by myself, I took
the three years' work for that time and entered the University of
California. I hated to give up the hope of a University education