On July 17, 1905, Edgar Parks Snow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to James Edgar Snow and Anna Catherine Edelman. Snow's family was middle class; his grandparents were a carpenter and a farmer. James Snow, Edgar's father, owned a printing press where the young Edgar worked occasionally and it was here that Edgar's interest in journalism and writing was rooted. As teenagers, the Snow family lived in a house on Charlotte Place in Kansas City near Edgar's school. , Westport High School. This is the period in which two of the most important aspects of his life take place. He was never a model student and often skipped class, but he enjoyed the social aspect of his adolescence and education. He was a member of the Boy Scouts, a high school fraternity, and also wrote for both his high school and college newspapers. While attending Westport High, Edgar began working for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad where he occasionally took rides on trains out of Kansas City. In 1922, the summer Snow turned 17, he and two friends, Charles White and Bob Long, left Kansas City in search of adventure. They stopped first in Kansas to make money working in the corn fields and then continued their journey to California, stopping along the way at the Grand Canyon and the Royal Gorge. After taking a few courses at junior college in Kansas City and a brief move to New York City with his brother Howard, Edgar went to Columbia, Missouri, to study journalism at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1925. As in high school, he had a greater interest in the social aspect of the university and, despite being involved in a nationally advertised fraternity, he again began to fall behind in his school work. Distracted by desire... middle of paper... n was mainly interested in advertising and the business side of journalism, but this event changed his interests towards people and their unfair treatment. Upon Snow's return to Beijing In late July, he received a message from J.B. Powell that he would return to Shanghai as soon as possible. Powell had been sent to Manchuria by the Chicago Tribune to cover the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929. In Powell's absence, Snow was to serve as editor of the China Weekly Review. Snow held this position for nearly five months until he accepted a job as a traveling correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association that would end his stay in China and send him to Burma and India. He recommended himself for the job because it would allow him “time for study, freedom to travel, and relief from hours wasted reading flyers, propaganda, and agency materials”..”