The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor

Bayard Taylor circumnavigated the globe not once but twice, befriended emperors and Bedouins alike, and returned to tell tales that made Victorian America dream of distant shores. Russell H. Conwell's biography traces the improbable arc of a Pennsylvania farm boy who became one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated poets, novelists, and orators. From the California gold fields to the courts of Europe, from the pyramids of Egypt to the poetry of Goethe's Germany, Taylor lived about six lifetimes compressed into fifty-three years. Conwell, himself a remarkable polymath, writes with admiration about a man whose hunger for experience was matched only by his gift for rendering it in luminous prose. This is a portrait of American ambition in its most romantic incarnation, a man who refused to let the boundaries of his time contain his imagination.