Sea Fever
The True Adventures that Inspired our Greatest Maritime Authors, from Conrad to Masefield, Melville and Hemingway
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
How did a big-game fishing trip rudely interrupted by sharks inspire one of the key scenes in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea? How did Robert Louis Stevenson's cruise to the cannibal-infested South Sea islands prove instrumental in his writing of The Beach of Falesa and The Ebb Tide? How did Masefield survive Cape Horn and a near-nervous breakdown to write Sea Fever?
The waters of this world have swirled through storytelling ever since the Celts spun the tale of Beowulf and Homer narrated The Odyssey. This enthralling book takes us on a tour of the most dangerous, exciting and often eccentric escapades of literature's sailing stars, and how these true stories inspired and informed their best-loved works. Arthur Ransome, Erskine Childers, Jack London and many others are featured as we find out how extraordinary fact fed into unforgettable fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking its title from a John Masefield poem, Jefferson's study of how seafaring has influenced great American and English writers has moments of great charm but ultimately falls flat. Jefferson, a maritime historian, covers household names like Ernest Hemingway, who had a passion for big-game fishing; James Fenimore Cooper, whom Jefferson considers the first of the modern nautical novelists; and Herman Melville, whose experiences aboard a whaling ship found voice in his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Jefferson pinpoints 18th-century satirist Tobias Smollett as the first to write convincingly about the sea and ship life, after serving in the Royal Navy as a surgeon's mate. Other authors covered include Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad. Jefferson writes in a winsome, casual, somewhat hyperbolic style, and clearly loves both the sea and his equally salty subjects, but that may not be enough to engage even those readers generally interested in the authors whose work he analyzes. Jefferson cheerfully confesses that he is not writing as a literary critic or a scholar, rather offering a mostly descriptive, occasionally speculative account of the convergence of seafaring and literature. His intense focus offers some revelations, but more often provokes a feeling that the big picture is being obscured by this microscopic approach. Illus.
