Emily Hahn was a woman ahead of her time, graced with a sense of adventure and a gift for living. Born in St. Louis in 1905, she crashed the all-male precincts of the University of Wisconsin geology department as an undergraduate. She traveled alone to the Belgian Congo at age 25, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, and bore the child of the head of the British Secret Service before World War II. She finally returned to New York to live and write in Greenwich Village.

In this memoir, first published as essays in The New Yorker, Hahn writes vividly and amusingly about the people and places she came to know and love — with an eye for the curious and a heart for the exotic.

This fascinating memoir includes twenty-three of her articles from The New Yorker, published between 1937 and 1970. Hahn's wanderlust led her to explore nearly every corner of the world, making her a trend-setter among women.