Thomas Wallace Knox found himself drawn to critically look at, and descriptively write about, his surroundings.  Born on 26 June 1835, in Pembroke, New Hampshire, little is known about Knox’s childhood and adolescence.  As an adult, he was discontented with either his life as the headmaster of Kingston Academy, or with the education of others, and Knox struck out on his own.  In the year 1860 Knox found himself in the Colorado goldfields, not as a miner, but as a reporter and newspaper printer.  Cutting his teeth by writing for the Rocky Mountain News (Denver-1860) and the Western Mountaineer (Golden, CO 1859-1860), James Wren tells us in his biography of Knox that he:

Understood his audience, and he shaped his writing to capture and hold their intellectual curiosity by a characteristic simplification of even the most complicated issues of the day.  To this end he asked the five basic questions at the heart of good journalistic reportage-who? what? when? where? and why?- and never more.  However mundane or pedestrian Knox’s approach, writing with a specific audience in mind led to a large readership for his work.

This experience as a correspondent in the rough environment of the Colorado Territory prepared Knox for his next endeavor, that of a war correspondent. 

Knox enlisted in the California National Guard as a Lieutenant Colonel at the outbreak of the Civil War and was subsequently discharged after being wounded during a skirmish in Missouri.  Knox returned to what he was most skilled at, writing newspaper articles, this time for the New York Herald.  It was here that Knox ran afoul of General Grant when he published information concerning troop locations, which Grant believed aided the enemy.  Grant had Knox court-martialed for "giving intelligence to the enemy," and "being a spy."    Although a personal appeal to President Lincoln got his conviction revoked, Knox never regained the good graces of Grant. 

Knox’s most significant contribution to the war effort came not from the articles he wrote, but from his ability to solve problems.  Recognizing the difficulties Grant had in commanding armies where specific battlefield information was unavailable, Knox developed a method of sending battle plans by telegraph and was later granted a patent for this invention.  His wartime newspaper articles would later be combined into Camp-fire and Cotton-field, Southern Adventure in Time of War: Life with the Union Armies, and Residence on a Louisiana Plantation, a widely popular book seeing three publication runs in 1865.

Following the Civil War, Knox began his worldwide travels.  His experience in the field with the Union Army combined with his knowledge of the telegraph, gained him a position with the Russo-American Telegraph Company.  He published Overland through Asia (1870) describing his adventures in Siberia, China and Russia. It was the success of this second book that convinced Knox that his true calling was to travel and write about his experiences in locations where most of his target audience would be unable to travel. 

Knox’s ability to become fluent in languages eased his interactions with native peoples around the world, gaining him access to the inner circles of the aristocracy and government.  Using this access and the freedom of movement that it provided, Knox traveled the world, recording his observations and experiences, making them available to his targeted audience.  Knox eventually wrote forty-six books between 1865 and his death in 1896, seven of which were republished under different titles.  One of the most successful of his endeavors was The Boy Travelers series, with twenty volumes published as part of this series.  Knox was so respected as a writer of travelogues for boys, that Henry M. Stanley approached Knox to have his famous tome, Through the Dark Continent, rewritten as part of The Boy Travelers series.  This was then published under the title The Boy Travelers on the Congo: Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey with Henry M. Stanley "Through the Dark Continent" (1887).

Knox died 6 January 1896, in New York City at the age of 61, less than a year after returning from a trip to the Sahara.  Knox’s "who, what, when, how, and why" system of newspaper reporting framed the approach he took in writing his travelogues.  Unlike other travel writers of his time, he saw things through the lens of an objective reporter and not that of an ideologue or nationalist.