The reputation of this well-known writer rests, for the most part, on a large body of short fiction about the people of the Marico and on his skilfully created raconteur Oom Schalk Lourens, narrator of many of the stories. Few people are aware, however, that Bosman's literary career began much earlier, when he was a scholar at Jeppe High School. His contributions to issues of the school magazine of 1921, which contain a pair of sketches in Sherlock Holmes vein, were aimed at a different audience from the adult readers of the Johannesburg Sunday Times who, in 1921 and 1922, would have been entertained by over a dozen tales from the pen of the young Bosman. The last of the juvenile prose from his pen was published in 1925 in The University of the Witwatersrand Student Magazine: The Umpa. All of these youthful works anticipate aspects of the creative talent that would later establish Bosman as one of South Africa's best-loved men of letters and have been made available in this compilation for the first time since their initial publication in the nineteen-twenties.