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On July 17, 1905, Edgar Parks Snow was born in Kansas City, Missouri to James Edgar Snow and Anna Catherine Edelman. Snows family was middle class; his grandfathers were a carpenter and a farmer. James Snow, Edgar’s father, owned a printing shop where young Edgar would occasionally work and it was here that Edgars interest in journalism and writing was rooted.

In his teens, the Snow family lived in a house on Charlotte Place in Kansas City near Edgar’s school, Westport High School. This is the period where two of the most important aspects of his life. He was never a model student and often skipped class but enjoyed the social aspect of his adolescence and education. He was a member the Boy Scouts, a high school's fraternity, and also wrote for both his high school’s and junior college’s newspapers. While attending Westport High, Edgar began working for the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad where he would occasionally take trips on the trains heading out of Kansas City. In 1922, the summer than Snow turned 17, he and two friends, Charles White and Bob Long, left Kansas City in search of adventure. They first stopped in Kansas to make some money working in the wheat fields and then continued on their way out to California stopping along the way at the Grand Canyon and Royal Gorge.

After taking a few courses at junior college in Kansas City and a short relocation to New York City with his brother Howard, Edgar went to to Columbia, Missouri to study Journalism at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1925. As in high school, he had a greater interest in the social aspect of the university and, despite being involved with a national advertising fraternity, again started to fall behind in his course work. Distracted by the desire...

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...n mostly interested in advertising and the business side of journalism but this event changed his interests towards the people and their unfair treatment.

Upon Snows arrival back in Pekingi near the end of July, he received a message from J.B. Powell that he was to return to Shanghai as soon as possible. Powell had been dispatched to Manchuria by the Chicago Tribune to cover The Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929. In Powell’s absence, Snow was to act as the editor for the China Weekly Review. Snow held this position for almost five months until he accepted a job as a roving correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association that would end his time in china and send him down into Burma and India. He recommended himself for the job because it would allow “time for study, freedom to travel, and release from hours wasted reading handouts, propaganda and agency material.”