North America — Volume 1

In 1861, Anthony Trollope arrived in America with a peculiar mission: to correct the record his mother had written three decades earlier, which had savaged American manners and customs. What he found instead was a nation tearing itself apart. Written during the Civil War, this travelogue captures the United States at its most volatile, a country simultaneously brutal and buoyant, vulgar and visionary. Trollope roams from Washington to the frontier, observing politics, slavery, education, and the peculiar American obsession with equality. He's unsparing in his criticism of democratic crudity, yet never contemptuous. He sees the seeds of the future world in the chaos before him, detecting romance beneath the vulgar surface. What emerges is a portrait of a nation in crisis, rendered by a writer who looked not down on what he saw, but directly at it, admiring, irritated, fascinated in equal measure.