Frederick O'Brien (1869-1932)[1] was an author, journalist, hobo, peripatetic world traveler, and public administrator. He wrote three best-selling travel books about French Polynesia between 1919 and 1922: White Shadows in the South Seas, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, and Atolls of the Sun. A movie was made in 1928 of White Shadows in the South Seas. Frederick O'Brien was born in 1869 in Baltimore into a comfortable Irish Catholic family. Family beliefs tended to leftist activism and outrage over social injustice. He referred to his devout sister Mary as a Catholic Trotskyite for her radicalism. Following three years at Loyola Jesuit College, he dropped out to travel. He spent 1887 exploring Venezuela and Brazil by foot, and worked in asphalt pits in Trinidad. Returning home, he studied law briefly, "plodding through irksome duties as a law clerk." Setting out again as a self-proclaimed hobo, he traveled throughout the States. He worked as a reporter for future U.S president Warren Harding's newspaper in Marion, Ohio.[2] In 1894 he was a general in Coxey's Army of the unemployed and its march on Washington, D.C.[3] On May 26, 1897 in Chicago, Illinois he married Gertude Harriman Frye. They had no children and soon lived apart.[4] Less