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Jan Welzl (1868-1948).

Article Excerpt
In the 1930s and 1940s, a man named Jan Welzl lived in the Yukon Territory's Dawson City, a town more or less surrounded by goldfields. Unlike other Dawsonites, however, Welzl did not prospect for gold. Instead, he occupied himself with the construction of a perpetual motion machine. This contraption seems to have been composed of various pipe fittings, axles, and counterweights, with the occasional beer bottle and tin can thrown in for good measure; it also had a cavorting ball, to which Welzl--called "John Inventor" by his neighbours--would point and, in his typically broken English, say: "She go up, she go down, she go "yah, yah, yah."

Welzl is remembered in Dawson as a harmless eccentric, a man who hurt no one but himself, since his invention blocked access to his stove and thus prevented him from eating. No doubt his Dawson neighbors would have been surprised to learn that the unconventional Czech had recently been at the center of a literary controversy.

The book that inspired this controversy, Thirty Years in the Golden North, first appeared in English in 1932. As a selection of the prestigious Book-of-the-Month Club, it sold more than 150000 copies in only a few months. Welzl's rollicking tales of life in the frigid North delighted even readers who preferred less adventurous fare, perhaps because the book's narrative style has a conversational, "you are there" quality. Macmillan, the original publisher of the book, marketed it as nonfiction, but some of its reviewers thought it might be a bit more fancy than fact.

Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in a letter (entitled "Hakluyt or Hoax?") to the Saturday Review of Literature (9 July 1932), went one step further. He proposed that Thirty Years in the Golden North should be considered a parody of...