John James Audubon

John James Audubon was the kind of man American mythology is built on: a frontiersman, an artist, and an obsessive who spent his life chasing birds across wilderness that no longer exists. In this intimate biography, John Burroughs, himself a founding father of American nature writing, traces Audubon's extraordinary journey from Louisiana runaway to the creator of "The Birds of America", the most magnificent ornithological work ever produced. The book follows Audubon's three distinct lives: the joyful youth of a Creole transplant, the disastrous decade of business failures that wiped out his inheritance, and the long, grueling campaign to document every bird in North America. Burroughs writes with the knowing admiration of one naturalist honoring another, capturing both Audubon's relentless determination and his gifts as a painter who saw creatures no one had truly seen before. This is a book about the birth of American natural science, about the collision of European technique with American wilderness, and about a man who refused to let poverty, rejection, or the wilderness defeat him.