Jack London was born in 1876 in San Francisco, Joseph Kessel in 1898 in Villa Clara in Argentina and Blaise Cendrars in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. It seems that during this period, at the end of the 19th century, there was a strange wind blowing through America, Switzerland and Argentina, which influenced young people, still only in their teens, to sense the impending upheavals of history and go off and discover strange lands and uncharted territories. This was a group of young people who had a shared passion for books and literature.