I Walked with Heroes

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c1961. First Edition. Presumed First Printing. Hardcover. Good/fair. 22 cm, 342 pages. Illus., author's inscribed business card/gift plate pasted onto front flyleaf. Inscribed by the author. Carlos Peña Romulo, QSC PLH (14 January 1898 - 15 December 1985) was a Filipino diplomat, statesman, soldier, journalist and author. He was a reporter at 16, a newspaper editor by the age of 20, and a publisher at 32. He was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, a general in the US Army and the Philippine Army, university president, President of the UN General Assembly, was eventually named one of the Philippines' National Artists in Literature, and was the recipient of many other honors and honorary degrees. His hometown is Camiling, Tarlac and he studied at the Camiling Central Elementary School during his basic education. I Walked with Heroes is an autobiographical book written by Carlos P. Romulo, a former Philippine general, journalist, poet, story writer, diplomat, former resident commissioner to Washington, D.C., former Philippine ambassador to the United States, and former President of the United Nations General Assembly. In I Walked with Heroes, Romulo personally reviewed his boyhood, early life, school days, and career in which he presented the facts and events with "frankness, intimacy, sense of person-to-person communication". It included Romulo's memories of his parents and the first time he met the Americans in the person of soldiers stationed in Camiling, his native town in Tarlac. The time was during the Philippine War of Independence. The nameless soldier taught Romulo and other Filipino boys how to read and write in English using Edward Baldwin's Primer. Romulo also narrated his life in Manila when he was both a morning-time student and an evening-time news reporter. A part of the book mentioned how Romulo was praised by then President of the Philippine Senate Manuel L. Quezon after writing a news item against Quezon's political opponents. In the pages of the autobiography, the reader would find that Romulo was comfortable in employing humor such as "telling jokes on himself", particularly in reference to his height to make the reader enjoy his writing. The book revealed Romulo's "unfailing faith in mankind"