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The following is excerpted from the article Heart of Sharpness: Travel writer's long-lost work given new life by Kingston author by Hollie Pratt-Campbell.
Seventy-eight years later, a long-lost travel narrative detailing American author and journalist Emily Hahn's adventures in Congo – which included a shocking encounter with a real-life Mr. Kurtz figure – will at last see the light of day thanks to the efforts of a Kingston writer.
"In a nutshell, she went to the Congo looking for adventure," says Ken Cuthbertson, the man who made it all come together. "And she found more adventure than you'd ever think."
The book, called Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North, was not able to be published in its true form when it originally came out in 1933 due to the controversial nature of some of the material. Specifically, while in the Congo, Hahn stayed for a time with an American anthropologist, Patrick Putman.
"Putman, as Emily Hahn told me, 'went native,'" says Cuthbertson. "He started to go crazy, had six or seven black wives, and was kind of ruling his own little area of the Congo like he was the lord of it."
At one point, Hahn visited Putman's compound and found one of the wives on the front lawn, beaten and chained to a fence with a dog collar around her neck. When Hahn approached Putman about the incident, he warned her to be careful or she would be next.
"She wrote about it in the book, and Putman's family was scandalized by it," explains Cuthbertson. "They said if the book got published (they would sue her), and the father, who was a prominent doctor, (threatened to kill himself)."
To learn more about Congo Solo, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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