| Summary/Abstract |
“How Would You Like to Go to Africa?” beckoned a headline in Boys’ Life, the official Boy Scouts of America magazine, in March of 1928.1 George Palmer Putnam, a noted New York publisher and publicist, Honorary Scout, and sometime explorer, was looking for new authors for his “Boys’ Books by Boys” series, in which young adventurers wrote accounts of their travels for juvenile audiences. After sorting through some two hundred applications, a selection committee made up of Putnam, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and Chief Scout Executive James E. West had found their young men.2 That summer, three talented Eagle Scouts—Robert Dick Douglas Jr., David R. Martin Jr., and Douglas Oliver—would accompany celebrity explorers Martin and Osa Johnson on safari in Kenya and British-administered Tanganyika, and in October the boys appeared as the authors of Three Boy Scouts in Africa.3 The book was a roaring success, selling around 125,000 copies in less than a year.4 It even had a special school edition, as well as translations into French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Czech, and Hungarian.
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