| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

John James Audubon: The Making of an American. By Richard Rhodes. (New York: Knopf, 2004. x, 514 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-41412-6.)

Richard Rhodes, winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), has written another splendid book, this one about one of the most heralded but, in many ways, unstudied characters in American history: the artist, naturalist, and writer John James Audubon. The outline of Audubon's story is well known, and it is not as if Audubon has not been the subject of numerous books; more than one hundred have been published about him since his death in 1851, including his journals and two volumes of letters, Francis Hobart Herrick's pioneering two-volume narrative in 1917, Alice Ford's long-standard biography in 1964 (revised in 1988), and, in the last two years, a novel and three new biographies. But Audubon is a hard character to personify, perhaps because he crossed so many boundaries, being accomplished as a writer (what other artist has a volume of the Library of America dedicated to his writings?), artist, and naturalist, and only a few scholars have made the effort, notably Linda Partridge in her 1992 dissertation and Margaret Welch in her 1998 The Book of Nature. But curiosity persists, driven by the demand for the spectacular 391/2-by-261/2-inch engraved plates that made up the 435 pages of The Birds of America (or double elephant folio, as it has come to be called; 1827–1839) as well as his story itself.

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