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John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America
North Point Press
June 2004
On Sale: June 16, 2004
384 pages
ISBN: 0865476713
EAN: 9780865476714
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The life and times of a complex genius and the
masterpiece he created
In the century and a half
since Audubon's death, his name has become synonymous with
wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people
know what a complicated figure he was--or the dramatic story
behind The Birds of America.
Before Audubon,
ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds
perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-wracked
skies or ripping flesh from freshly killed prey, Audubon's
life-size birds looked as if they might fly screeching off
the page. The wildness in the images matched the untamed
spirit in Audubon--a self-taught painter and self-anointed
aristocrat who, with his buckskins and long hair, wanted to
be seen as both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man
of science.
In truth, neither his friends nor his
detractors ever knew exactly who Audubon was or where he
came from. Tormented by a fog of ambiguities surrounding his
birth, he reinvented himself ceaselessly, creating a life as
dramatic as his fictionalizations of it. But when he came
east at thirty-eight--broke and desperate to find a
publisher for his Birds--he ran squarely into a
scientific establishment still wedded to convention and
suspicious of the brash newcomer and his grandiose claims.
It took Audubon fifteen years to prevail in both his
project and his vision. How he triumphed and what drove him
is the subject of this gripping narrative.
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