Travels of William Bartram - Hardcover

Bartram, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616402695 ISBN 13: 9781616402693

Publisher: Cosimo Classics, 2010

Synopsis

In its time, it was considered the most significant work of American natural history. Coleridge, Emerson, and Wordsworth were fans, and drew from it for their own work. It is, in short, one of the most important volumes of 18th-century nature and travel writing. American botanist and naturalist WILLIAM BARTRAM (1739-1823) embarked upon a solitary four-year journey, just prior to the American Revolution, through what is now the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, through Cherokee and Creek country, through confrontations with bears and crocodiles, through country rough and beautiful. In the classic work first published in 1791, he tells with wondrous poetry and delicate insight the story of his travels and of the people, plants, and animals he encountered. This replica of the 1928 edition edited by Pulitzer Prize winner MARK VAN DOREN (1894-1972) is complete with the original maps, diagrams, and botanical and ethnographical illustrations. A beautiful work of history and literature, it belongs in the library of anyone interested in pre-Revolutionary America and its natural environs.

About this title

About the Author:

William Bartram (1739-1823) is renowned as one of the first early American naturalists. Francis Harper (1886-1972) was a noted field biologist and the author of many books, including "Okefinokee Album" (Georgia).

Review:

It is the visionary quality which gives Bartram's writing its special radiance: the passionate, wonder-struck, daring, and very personal scientism, the repeated acts of rapt, total absorption.

(James Dickey)

This is much more than a new edition of The Travels; it is really two books in one. . . . Harper has traveled the routes followed by John Bartram in the 1760's and William in the 1770's. The study is a labor of love, but also a labor of great scholarly value . . . Superb [and] indispensable.

(American Quarterly)

In the southeastern forests and savannahs, Bartram experienced a wild that we can no longer know in our mechanized and urbanized present. Our sense of environmental loss imparts an elegiac fascination to his evocative and rapturous descriptions.

(New Republic)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cosimo Classics
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1616402695
• ISBN 13: 9781616402693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 436