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.