After the great companions

Charles Joseph Finger was born in Willesden, England, the son of a tailor. He attended several small private schools, and then King's College in London, although he left university before receiving a degree. He studied music in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. In 1887, his parents immigrated to the United States, but he remained in England working in activism. Between 1890 and 1895, he travelled South America, working odd jobs such as sheep and cattle herding, panning for gold, and harvesting and selling sealskins. In 1893, he was a guide for the Franco-Russian Ornithological Expedition to Tierra del Fuego. He returned to England, then came to New York City in 1896 and became an American citizen. He travelled to San Angelo, Texas, where he worked herding sheep and wrote articles for the San Angelo Standard, the Houston Labor Journal, and Searchlight magazine. In 1902, while directing the San Angelo Music Conservatory, he married. In 1904 he and his family moved to New Mexico, where he worked in a railroad shop. In 1905 he became an auditor for the Ohio River and Columbus Railway Company in Ripley, Ohio. He went on to become a director of the company. In 1919, he published three short stories in literary magazine The Mirror, where he became a writer until the magazine folded in 1920, and he and his family moved to Fayetteville, where he became a full-time writer. He started his own magazine, called All’s Well, or The Mirror Repolished. He went on to write thirty-six books. In 1925, his book Tales from Silver Lands won the Newbery Medal.