This volume provides the most comprehensive selection of Audubon's writings ever published, along with a portfolio of his drawings.

This unprecedented anthology of John James Audubon's lively and colorful writings about the American wilderness reintroduces the great artist and ornithologist as an exceptional American writer, a predecessor to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville. Audubon's award-winning biographer, Richard Rhodes, has gathered excerpts from his journals, letters, and published works, and has organized them to appeal to general readers. Rhodes's unobtrusive commentary...

At the start of the 19th century, John James Audubon embarked upon an epic ornithological quest across America with nothing but his artist's materials, an assistant and a gun. Driving him on through terrible storms, encounters with ferocious bears and dangerous people, Audubon's all-consuming passion for birds came to define his entire life - but what would the world make of his expressive and distinctly unscientific illustrations upon return?