Jan de Hartog (April 22, 1914 – September 22, 2002) was a Dutch playwright, novelist and occasional social critic who moved to the United States in the early 1960s and became a Quaker. Early life Jan de Hartog was born to a Dutch Calvinist minister and professor of theology, Arnold Hendrik, and his wife, Lucretia de Hartog, who herself was a lecturer in medieval mysticism, in 1914. He was raised in the city of Haarlem, in the Netherlands. At around the age of 11, he ran away to become a cabin boy, otherwise referred to as a "sea mouse", on board a Dutch fishing boat. His father had him brought home, but shortly afterwards, Jan ran off to sea again. The experiences thus gained became material for some of his future novels, like many of his other life experiences. At 16, he briefly attended the Kweekschool voor de Zeevaart in Amsterdam, a training college for the Dutch merchant marine, but only for year. His own account was that he was expelled and was told emphatically by his angry schoolmaster, "This school is not for pirates!" De Hartog was a coal shoveller on the night shifts with the Amsterdam Harbour Police until 1932. As he often had spare time, he began to write there. While employed as skipper of a tour boat on the Amsterdam Canals, he wrote several mysteries featuring Inspector Gregor Boyarski of the Amsterdam Harbor Police. At the time, he used a pseudonym "F. R. Eckmar". That is euphemistically translatable as "whatever" but has a literal meaning of is drop dead and is commonly used like the English expression go and jump in the lake. The words, "luckily", according to the author himself, were never translated into English. His theater career began in the late 1930s at the Amsterdam Municipal Theater, where he acted in and wrote a play. World War II De Hartog's career as a writer, as well as his personal life, was decisively influenced by a coincidence that occurred during World War II. In May 1940, just ten days before Nazi Germany had invaded and swiftly occupied the hitherto-neutral Netherlands, de Hartog published his book Hollands Glorie (Holland's Glory, translated much later into English as Captain Jan). The novel described the life of the highly skilled sailors on ocean-going tugboats, a specialized field of nautical enterprise in which the Dutch have always taken the lead.