author
Charles Mayer
1862–1927
Drawn from years spent capturing and supplying wild animals in Southeast Asia, his adventure writing offers a vivid look at circus life, jungle travel, and the attitudes of an earlier era. Best known for Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles, he wrote from direct experience in the field.
1 Audiobook
Trapping wild animals in Malay jungles
by Charles Mayer
About the author
Born in 1862 in Binghamton, New York, he became known as an American animal collector, tamer, and circus supplier. Accounts of his life describe him working in Malaysia and Singapore and building a career around capturing animals for zoos and circuses, experiences that later shaped his writing.
His best-known book, Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles (1921), presents those experiences as a fast-moving memoir of travel and animal capture. Today, the book is often read as both an adventure narrative and a historical document, reflecting the show-business and colonial world in which he worked.
He died on May 14, 1927, in New York City. Some modern references also note that parts of his published work were later criticized for plagiarism, a detail that complicates his legacy but helps place him more honestly in literary history.