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 grandfathers were a carpenter and a farmer. James Snow, Edgar's father, owned a printing shop where 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 where two of the most important aspects of one's life take place. He was never a model student and often skipped school, 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 his high school and college newspapers. While attending Westport High, Edgar began working for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, where he took occasional trips on the trains from 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 first stopped in Kansas to earn some money working in the wheat fields, then continued on to California, stopping along the way at the Grand Canyon and Royal Gorge. After taking a few classes at college in Kansas City and a short move to New York with his brother Howard, Edgar went to Columbia, Missouri, to study journalism at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1925. As in In high school, he became more interested in the social aspect of college and, despite being involved in a national advertising fraternity, he again began to fall behind in his classes. Distracted by lust...... newspaper environment...... and mostly interested in advertising and the business side of journalism, but this event changed his interests towards people and their unfair treatment. Upon Snow's arrival in Beijing. towards the end of July he received a message from JB Powell informing him that he should 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 act as editor of the China Weekly Review. Snow held this position for nearly five months until he accepted a position as a traveling correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association that would end his time in China and send him to Burma and India. He recommended himself for the position because it would give him "time to study, freedom to travel and release from hours wasted reading documents, propaganda and agency materials »..”