Category Books

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century »

Authors: Witold Rybczynski
ISBN-13: 9780684865751, ISBN-10: 0684865750
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: July 2000
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski, born in Edinburgh, raised in Canada, and currently living in Philadelphia, is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written on architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Home and the A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of frederick Law Olmsted, for which he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize.

Book Synopsis

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Andrew Ferguson

[Landscaping] really was an art form onceand the life of the man who made it so deserves to be remembered....A Clearing in the Distance is...humanelivelylearned but not pedanticbrief but comprehensive....What better time to rediscover Olmstead and reclaim the patrimony he hoped to leave us? —Fortune

Contents

Foreword

Schemes

1. "Tough as nails"

2. Frederick goes to school

3. Hartford

4. "I have no objection"

5. New York

6. A year before the mast

7. Friends

8. Farming

9. More farming