Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
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Rockwell Kent

Franklin Classics Trade Press

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an artist of extraordinary drive, talent, and versatility; he embraced life with exuberance. And though he was one of the most popular American illustrators of this century—so much so that The New Yorker published the ditty, "That day will mark a precedent, which brings no news of Rockwell Kent"—the controversies engendered by his socialist leanings, particularly during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, frequently overshadowed his artistic achievements. His major art was inspired by his extended stays in remote, sparsely inhabited and climatically harsh regions, most of them islands, to which his imagination was drawn for a mythic association with the mystical and marvelous. Distant Shores captures Kent's great enthusiasm for the sea and mountains, and the relationship between nature and humanity. Produced to accompany a traveling exhibition of the artist's work, this handsome volume features eighty paintings, prints, and drawings, (more than fifty in full color) related to Kent's sojourns in the wilderness—Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland. Included in this collection are works from The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg that have been unavailable to the public since the early 1960s. Kent's dramatic black-and-white illustrations for Herman Melville's Moby Dick—the engravings that popularized his work in the United States—are also featured. The essays describe Kent's career as a painter, printmaker, book designer, illustrator, and prolific writer. Constance Martin contextualizes the work in the exhibition by providing an informative and insightful background of Kent's life and art. Richard West contributes fascinating details about Kent's childhood and early adult life, his mastery of the print medium, and his involvement with American political thought during the McCarthy period.

Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent

Arts & Photography

Richard West

Constance Martin

History & Criticism

University of California Press

A Northern Christmas

Wesleyan

When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by E in a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors' item. Little wonder, for readers are immediately drawn to Kent's vivid descriptions of the experience; we share "the feeling of wind and wet and cold, of lifting seas and steep descents, of rolling over as the wind gusts hit," and the sound "of wind in the shrouds, of hard spray flung on a drum-tight canvas, of rushing water at the scuppers, of the gale shearing a tormented sea." When the ship sinks in a storm-swept fjord within 50 miles of its destination, the story turns to the stranding and subsequent rescue of the three-man crew, salvage of the vessel, and life among native Greenlanders. Magnificently illustrated by Kent's wood-block prints and narrated in his poetic and highly entertaining style, this tale of the perils of killer nor'easters, treacherous icebergs, and impenetrable fog ― and the joys of sperm whales breaching or dawn unmasking a longed-for landfall ― is a rare treat for old salts and landlubbers alike.

N by E

Travel

Travel Writing

Wesleyan University Press

In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America's premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their 7-month odyssey describes what Kent called "an adventure of the spirit." He soon discovers how deeply he is "stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world" as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent's drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space ― both external and internal ― at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska―Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent's second trip to Greenland. Salamina unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes, each illustrated with Kent's bold black and white drawings. Through his accounts of fishing trips and Christmas festivities, shared meals and budding friendships, Kent acquaints us with the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the small vibrant community of Igdlorssuit. Both the native people and the forbidding Arctic landscape held a special beauty for Kent, and he describes them with an artist's eye. Salamina is Kent's Eskimo housekeeper (kifak), who becomes a central figure in the book when she and her daughter come to share Kent's small hut for the year. Kent's wry self-reflection and his poetic meditations on nature, humanity and love make this an enduring classic of travel literature and artistic quest. This Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by art historian Scott R. Ferris that highlights the cultural importance of the text and illustrations and shows that for Kent, inspiration comes from life.

Salamina

Europe

In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America's premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their 7-month odyssey describes what Kent called "an adventure of the spirit." He soon discovers how deeply he is "stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world" as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent's drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space -- both external and internal -- at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska--Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal

Doug Capra

Memoirs

Journal entries, line drawings, and letters record a 1918 winter spent by the author and his small son on a remote Alaskan island

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska

Photography & Video

Leete's Island Books

Excerpt from Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska No other of the qualities of the journal and drawings goes home to me more than the unforced authenticity of the impression set down by this strong and ardent artist. Emerson's grandeur is in finitely more convincing to me because of his homeliness, and I feel a perverse Yankee suspicion of those who deal in sublimities only. The man who can extract the whole quaint savor out of that magical, prosaic, humorous moment of human life, the first stretch ing yawn of the early morning, that man can make me believe that I too see the north wind running mightily athwart the sky. And the artist who can put into the simplest drawing of a man and a little boy eating together at a rough table in a rough cabin, all the dear solidity of family and home life, with its quiet triumph against over powering Nature, that artist can make me how my head before the sincerity of his impressive Night. The homeliness of the diary, its courageously unaffected natural ness, how it carries one out of fussy complications to a long breath of relief in the fewness and permanence of things that count! And the humor of it sometimes deliciously unintentional like the picture of the artist finishing a fine drawing, setting the beans to soak, bathing in the bread pan, and going to bed to read a chapter of Blake, sometimes intentional and shrewd like a banana - peel on a mountain - top tames that wilderness, or colds, like bad temper and loss of faith, are a malady of the city crowd sometimes outright and hearty like a child's joke, as in the amusingly faithful portrait of the pot-bellied, self-important personality of the air-tight stove! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (Classic Reprint)

Children's Books

Forgotten Books

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Books by Rockwell Kent

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rockwell Kent. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan

Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan

Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent

A Northern Christmas

N by E

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska―Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal

Salamina

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska--Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (Classic Reprint)