John James Audubon

Writings and Drawings

64 full-color plates • Mississippi River Journal • Missouri River Journals • 45 entries from the Ornithological Biography • letters and other writings

Here is the most comprehensive selection of Audubon's writings ever published, along with a spectacular portfolio of his drawings. The "Mississippi River Journal," the foremost record of an American artist's progress, details Audubon's first wilderness bird hunts; it is as fresh in its perceptions of the scenes and characters of the old South as of the forest and its creatures. Selections from his "1826 Journal" follow Audubon to Europe, where after years of relative obscurity and financial distress his abilities were finally recognized. Audubon's masterwork, the five-volume Ornithological Biography, is represented here by 45 entries. Charming, haunting, and violent by turns, these vivid intimate portraits of the habits and habitats of American birds changed American nature writing forever.

In the "Missouri River Journals," Audubon evokes the vanishing American Indian and the hardships of frontier life. An extensive selection of letters charting 20 years of Audubon's artistic development, along with two essays on artistic technique and a brief memoir, round out the volume. Whenever possible, texts have been painstakingly prepared from original sources, without censorship or modernizing revision, constituting a major contribution to Audubon scholarship. Detailed general and ornithological indexes aid the reader in the field as well as in the study.

Sixty-four full-color plates and several manuscript sketches, some never before published, offer a unique perspective on Audubon's art. Including original watercolors, aquatint engravings and lithographs, they reveal the evolution of his compositions and the effects of his collaborations with his publishers in ways never before seen.

Christoph Irmscher, volume editor, is Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of Longfellow Redux, The Poetics of Natural History, and Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200.

Save $50 when you buy this book as part of the Treasury of American Nature Writing Set!

Also of interest:
William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings
John Muir: Nature Writings

Read Christoph Irmscher's speech, "Audubon the Writer," which was delivered at the premiere of the American Masters documentary, John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature.

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