Henry Morton Stanley was born in 1841 in Wales...As a child, Rowlands suffered years of abuse by his family and in the workhouse. In 1859, at the age of eighteen, he emigrated to America and began the process of reinventing himself, pretending to be an American and taking the name of Henry Hope Stanley, a successful cotton merchant he claimed he had met in New Orleans who informally adopted him and became a father figure to the young Stanley. In his autobiography, Stanley looks back on this time as being heavily affected by the abuse he endured and the stigma of illegitimacy. During the Civil War, Stanley became one of the few people to serve in the Confederate Army, Union Army, and the U. S. Navy, and after the war, he became a newspaper correspondent for the St. Louis "Missouri Democrat" covering General Hancock's army in the Indian campaigns. Stanley elaborates on his adventures during the Civil War and the Plains Indian Wars in the first half of the book. In 1868, Stanley began covering the war in Abyssinia for the "New York Herald," which sent him to Africa to find David Livingstone a year later, a feat that garnered him his first taste of international renown. Stanley then spent the following twenty years exploring and charting the African interior, authoring several best-selling books, and working as a colonial administrator for the Congo Free State of Belgian King Leopold II. In this latter endeavor, Stanley helped to establish one of the most controversial and violent colonial projects in the history of European imperialism. During this time, he worked on his autobiography...(DAB). However, Stanley died in 1904 before he could finish it, and his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1890, stepped in to edit and prepare it for publication, completing the work from Stanley's notes and drafts. It was then published in London and Boston in 1909.
