Overview

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes comes the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world. Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity. Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds--pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies--and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images. Now he finds his calling: to take his hundreds of watercolor drawings to England to be engraved in a great multivolume work called The Birds of America. Within weeks of his arrival there in 1826, he achieves remarkable celebrity as ""the American Woodsman."" He publishes his major work as well as five volumes of bird biographies enhanced by his authentic descriptions of pioneer American life. Audubon's story is an artist's story but also a moving love story. In his day, communications by letter across the ocean were so slow and uncertain that John James and his wife, Lucy, almost lost each other in the three years when the Atlantic separated them-until he crossed the Atlantic and half the American continent to claim her. Their letters during this time are intimate, moving, and painful, and they attest to an enduring love. We examine Audubon's legacy of inspired observation--the sonorities of a wilderness now lost, the brash life of a new nation just inventing itself--precisely, truthfully, lyrically captured. And we see Audubon in the fullness of his years, made rich by his magnificent work, winning public honor: embraced by writers and scientists, f�ted by presidents and royalty. Here is a revelation of Audubon as the major American artist he is. And here he emerges for the first time in his full humanity--handsome, charming, volatile, ambitious, loving, canny, immensely energetic. Richard Rhodes has given us an indispensable portrait of a true American icon."

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Reviews

"""Audubon's story is at once intimate and mythic, and Rhodes' fresh, comprehensive biography will capture the imagination of readers everywhere."" -- ""Booklist (starred review)"" ""An absorbing story...and Rhodes tells it surpassingly well. Outstanding."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"" ""More than a mere biography: it is a comprehensive history of a man and his era...Rhodes breathes life again into the world in which Audubon lived."" -- ""Los Angeles Times Book Review"" ""Panoramic yet intensely detailed...[Rhodes] has conveyed the thrust of his subject's imagination and the force of his movement as if painting Audubon from life."" -- ""San Francisco Chronicle"" ""Rhodes has given us the most three-dimensional portrait yet of Audubon the man."" -- ""The Washington Post Book World"" ""Rhodes has managed to do for Audubon what Audubon did for birds...In this splendid biography, Rhodes has produced nothing less than a portrait of the United States in its formative years."" -- ""The New York Times Book Review"""

"""[Rhodes] has conveyed the thrust of his subject's imagination and the force of his movement as if painting Audubon from life."" -- ""San Francisco Chronicle"" ""A comprehensive history of a man and his era...Rhodes breathes life again into the world in which Audubon lived."" -- ""Los Angeles Times Book Review"" ""His life makes an engaging story, and Pulitzer Prize winner Rhodes chronicles every aspect of it, the commonplace as well as the audacious."" -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred review)"" ""Rhodes has given us the most three-dimensional portrait yet of Audubon the man."" -- ""Washington Post Book World"" ""Rhodes has managed to do for Audubon what Audubon did for birds...In this splendid biography, Rhodes has produced nothing less than a portrait of the United States in its formative years."" -- ""New York Times Book Review"" ""Audubon's story is at once intimate and mythic, and Rhodes' fresh, comprehensive biography will capture the imagination of readers everywhere."" -- ""Booklist (starred review)"" ""An absorbing story...and Rhodes tells it surpassingly well. Outstanding."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"""

More than a mere biography: it is a comprehensive history of a man and his era...Rhodes breathes life again into the world in which Audubon lived. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review Panoramic yet intensely detailed...[Rhodes] has conveyed the thrust of his subject's imagination and the force of his movement as if painting Audubon from life. -- San Francisco Chronicle Rhodes has given us the most three-dimensional portrait yet of Audubon the man. -- The Washington Post Book World Rhodes has managed to do for Audubon what Audubon did for birds...In this splendid biography, Rhodes has produced nothing less than a portrait of the United States in its formative years. -- The New York Times Book Review

Author Information

Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty-six books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford and a host and correspondent for documentaries on American public television. Alexander Adams is an award-winning audiobook narrator. He is best known for his reading of the novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. He has also narrated numerous books by Jonathan Kellerman and John Grisham.

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