Rockwell Kent (1872 - 1971) is perhaps best known for his illustrations for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Moby Dick. Kent also created the "random house" that, despite revision throughout the years, has been the colophon of that company since its inception in 1928. Kent's other travel books include N by E, Wilderness, and A Northern Christmas, all reissued by Wesleyan.
"To say that Voyaging is the literary equivalent of Rockwell Kent's
full-blooded paintings is to damn it with faint praise. It's a book
that can easily stand on its own beside any travel narrative of its
time or indeed our time. In fact, Voyaging is so fresh and robust
that it reads as if it had been written yesterday rather than in
the early 1920s."--Lawrence Millman, author of An Evening Among
Headhunters and Last Places
"To say that Voyaging is the literary equivalent of Rockwell Kent's
full-blooded paintings is to damn it with faint praise. It's a book
that can easily stand on its own beside any travel narrative of its
time or indeed our time. In fact, Voyaging is so fresh and robust
that it reads as if it had been written yesterday rather than in
the early 1920s."--Lawrence Millman, author of An Evening Among
Headhunters and Last Places
"Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned
with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism
popularity has so much of his work been available to the
public."--Scott R. Ferris, Smithsonian
"An account of Mr. Kent's attempt in a tiny sailboat to steer a
course from the Strait of Magellan south and west through the
mountainous-islanded channels of Tierra del Fuego around Cape Horn.
...Mr. Kent has caught the wild beauty of this ominous region--iron
crags ringed with the froth of blown surf, wind-tortured trees,
distant peaks incrusted with dazzling snow; but out of the very
heart of this bewildering beauty emanates a sense of unseen
presences appallingly, implacably hostile to man."--The Nation
"Rockwell Kent has the Midas knack--everything his pen touches
becomes literary gold. The publication of his 'Wilderness' gave
birth to the suspicion that here was a unique figure in the world
of letters. With the advent of 'Voyaging' that suspicion becomes a
conviction. No other literary artist is doing just what Kent is
doing."--New York Tribune
"Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned
with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism
popularity has so much of his work been available to the
public."--Scott R. Ferris, Smithsonian
"This is a book filled with roaring winds, black, smoking seas,
mountains that are terrible in the isolation they symbolize. Why
does the desire persist in men to visit places such as this? What
draws them on to certain discomfort, danger and separation from all
that civilized effort has won for them? Perhaps Mr. Kent has struck
upon the true answer here. 'This hour you are bound by the whole
habit of your life and thought, the next by unerring impulse of the
soul you are free. How strong and swift is pride to clear itself,
from misery or joy, from crowds, from ease, from failure, from
success, from the recurrent brim full, the too much? Forever shall
man seek the solitudes and the most utter desolation of the
wilderness to achieve through hardship the rebirth of his pride.' .
. . The strength and menace and majesty of the Cape Horn region
proved admirable material for Mr. Kent's black and white drawings.
They are not a mere adornment of his book, but an integral part of
it."--New York Times
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