A Pocket-Sized Short Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted in an Elegant Hardcover Edition

This volume begins with a short biography of Olmsted and a biographical directory of the friends and relatives who played leading roles in his early life. His letters show the skill in observation that made his later travel books so effective, and provide a vivid picture of coming of age in New England in the 1840s. Included are fascinating letters written during a voyage in the China Trade in 1842-43, and accounts of the trip to the British Isles in 1850 that he later described in his first book, "Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England"

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.

The Olmsted Papers project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Trust for the Humanities, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, as well as private foundations and individuals.

This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.