You can't win

You Can’t Win
BY JACK BLACK
With a foreword by ROBERT HERRICK
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1926 All rights reserved
Copyright 1925, By Jack Black.
Copyright 1926, By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1926.
Reprinted October, 1926. Reprinted December, 1926.
Printed in the United States of America By The Cornwall Press
This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks” Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The Author.
The revelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief. The honesty of the “confession” is self-evident. With a few lapses into the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing, either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities.