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, traveled alone to the Belgian Congo at age 25, was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, bore the child of the head of the British Secret Service before World War II, and 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.

Emily Hahn, staff writer for "The New Yorker" for more than 70 years, describes her experiences traveling alone in the Belgian Congo at age 25, her liaisons with a Chinese poet and a British spy, and her life as a writer in Greenwich Village.