Cendrars, Blaise

The Swiss-French author Blaise Cendrars was born as Frédéric-Louis Sauser in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His father was a businessman and inventor who travelled all over the world looking for business opportunities, so Cendrars was raised in Egypt, Italy and France. He left home as a teenager by jumping on the first train that happened to come into the station and went east. He eventually arrived in St. Petersburg where he was apprenticed to a jeweller/clockmaker. He started a football club and he became an anarchist for life during the 1905 revolution.