Klondike Mike: An Alaskan Odyssey

by Merrill Denison

Overview

Klondike Mike: An Alaskan Odyssey is Merrill Denison’s 1943 biography of Mike Ambrose Mahoney, a Canadian who travelled to the North in 1897 in search of gold and adventure. In Klondike Mike—a popular “Book of the Month Club” choice—Denison uses imagined omnipotent disclosures of his subject’s thoughts to enrich his writing with a sense of immediacy. In episodic scenes, readers accompany Mahoney through mishaps and adversity: Mahoney hauling a piano on his back up the Chilkoot Pass so that the Sunny Samson Sisters Sextette can get to Dawson to make their fortunes entertaining prospectors; or Mahoney setting a record with his team of dogs as they race across the frozen North from Dawson to Skagway in only fourteen days. The dramatic tension inherent in each of these adventures provides Klondike Mike with a surging narrative pulse and pace—a clever evocation of gold rush fever. In these ways, Klondike Mike demonstrates that Denison should be considered an early innovator of the genre now known as creative non-fiction.

Richly illustrated throughout.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789123036
Publisher:	Papamoa Press
Publication date:	01/13/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Merrill Denison (23 June 1893 - 13 June 1975) was a Canadian playwright, radio dramatist, essayist, journalist, environmental advocate, and writer of corporate histories. He created many dramas which were broadcast during the early days of radio, and was the art director of Hart House Theatre, Toronto, Ontario.

Denison was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Ontario, Canada, the son of Canadian author, dressmaker, theosophist, Whitmanite and feminist, Flora MacDonald (Merrill) Denison, and American garment salesman, Howard Denison. He studied architecture at Columbia University, then at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and finally at the University of Toronto. Instead of making a career as an architect, Denison began working as the art director of Hart House Theatre in Toronto. In 1926 he married Jessie Muriel Goggin. Denison soon began to write comedies, some of which were conceived at his summer home in what would later become Bon Echo and performed in the Tweed Playhouse in Tweed, Ontario. The Romance of Canada, a series of historical plays written by Denison, were broadcast as radio dramas in 1931 and 1932 by CNRV. During the decades that followed he prepared many plays for broadcast in the United States.

After the success of his biography on Mike Ambrose Mahoney in 1943, Klondike Mike: An Alaskan Odyssey, Denison turned his attention to other historical topics and soon gained a reputation as a prolific writer of popularized corporate histories, including Harvest Triumphant: The Story of Massey-Harris and The People’s Power: the History of Ontario Hydro (1960).

He passed away in San Diego, California, in 1975 at the age of 81.