Nonfiction

Under A Wild Sky

John James Audubon and the Making of the Birds of America

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was––or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as told in this “superb introduction to the artist and the man” (New York Times).

Before Audubon, ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-racked skies or ripping flesh from freshly killed prey, Audubon’s life-size birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. The wildness in the images matched their maker––a self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat, who, with his buckskins and long hair, was both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man of science.

Tormented by ambiguities surrounding his birth, Audubon reinvented himself ceaselessly. But when he came east at thirty-eight––broke and desperate to find a publisher––he ran into a scientific establishment still wedded to convention and suspicious of the newcomer. It took Audubon fifteen years to prevail in both his project and his vision. How he triumphed and what drove him are the subjects of William Souder’s gripping narrative, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

ISBN

9781571313553

Publish Date

07/22/2014

Pages

392

Dimensions

6 × 9 × 0.88 in

Weight

20.5 oz

Cover Art

Author

William Souder

William Souder is an award-winning journalist and is the author of three books, including Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Grant, Minnesota.

Praise and Prizes

“William Souder renders a fascinating portrait not only of Audubon but of the America he knew, a place so lush and fertile it seems almost mythical. But those drawings—foundational American documents—prove it was so, and this book makes new and compelling sense of them and their creator.”

Bill McKibben
“One feels Audubon’s power, and something deeply, peculiarly American… . A superb introduction to the artist and the man.”

New York Times
“A meticulous biography and a fascinating portrait of a young nation.”

San Francisco Chronicle
“Deftly weaves together the story of Audubon with the development of scientific inquiry in the early years of the republic and the lives of ordinary Americans as the new nation spilled westward over the mountains from the eastern seaboard.”

Los Angeles Times
“As richly endowed and densely packed as the forests of Audubon’s day.”

Minneapolis Star Tribune
“William Souder superbly captures Audubon in all his infuriating, contradictory, admirable richness. He splendidly evokes the colorful characters that surrounded him, the wild, rough-edged, game-rich American frontier where he found his life’s calling, the gritty streets of Europe and the scientific politics of Philadelphia and London—but at the core of Under a Wild Sky stands Audubon, brought to fascinating, enigmatic life.”

Scott Weidensaul

author of Living on the Wind

Under A Wild Sky

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