Occupation: Prizefighter: Freddie Welsh's Quest for the World Championship

The story of Freddie Welsh's rise from hobo to world champion is a gripping account of a flawed life lived in a world that exploited the strong and crushed the weak. Freddie Welsh emigrated from south Wales to Canada, and then to the United States in the final decade of the 19th century to become the best lightweight boxer of his generation. This biography details how he opened his training sessions to the public, created an aura around himself as an intellectual who read and discussed philosophy and literature, and opened a health farm in New York, as well as his death as alcoholic in Hell's Kitchen. This classic rise-and-fall story is of the man some consider a partial inspiration for Fitzgerald's Gatsby.