America’s first internationally acclaimed author, Washington
Irving, was also one of the first to write about its then
far-western frontier. After seventeen years in Europe, the famous
author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" returned to America and
undertook an extensive three-month journey through present-day
Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Describing scenery and
inhabitants with an eye to romantic sublimity and celebrating the
frontiersman’s "secret of personal freedom," Irving published his
account of that journey in 1835 as A Tour on the Prairies,
an early and distinctly American depiction of the young nation’s
borderland and its native inhabitants.
Irving followed up this eyewitness account with two works that
chart the dramatic and tumultuous history of the early American fur
trade, very much in the spirit of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales. Astoria 1836 recounts John
Jacob Astor’s attempt to establish a commercial empire in the
Pacific Northwest. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
1837 is a lively saga of exploration among the mountains, rivers,
and deserts of the Far West. While working closely from original
documents, Irving wrote also as a mythologist of the vast spaces
traversed by "Sindbads of the wilderness." In these three
compelling narratives he opened up a crucial region of the American
literary imagination influencing such authors as Poe, Hawthorne,
and Melville.
關於作者:
James P. Ronda, editor, is H. G. Barnard Professor in Western
History at the University of Tulsa and the author of Jefferson’s
West: A Journey with Lewis and Clark and Astoria and
Empire.
目錄:
A TOUR ON THE PRAIRIES
ASTORIA: OR ANECDOTES OF AN ENTERPRIZE
BEYOND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN BONNEVILLE
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes.