Audubon

Over the summer of 1821, a cash-strapped John James Audubon worked as a tutor at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana's rural West Feliciana Parish. This move initiated a profound change in direction for the struggling artist. Oakley's woods teemed with life, galvanizing Audubon to undertake one of the most extraordinary endeavors in the annals of art: a comprehensive pictorial record of America's birds. That summer, Audubon began what would eventually become his four-volume opus, Birds of America.

This unprecedented anthology of John James Audubon's lively and colorful writings about the American wilderness reintroduces the great artist and ornithologist as an exceptional American writer, a predecessor to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville.