Purple Land

By William Henry Hudson

Book Overview

First published in 1885, The Purple Land was the first novel of William Henry Hudson, author of Green Mansions. The Anglo-Argentine naturalist distinguished himself both as one of the finest craftsmen of prose in English literature and as a thinker on ecological matters far ahead of his time.
The Purple Land is the exuberant, often wryly comic, first-person account of a young Englishman's imprudent adventures, set against a background of political strife in nineteenth-century Uruguay. Eloping with an Argentine girl, young Richard Lamb makes an implacable enemy of his teenage bride's father. Leaving her behind, he goes ignorantly forth into the interior of the country to seek his fortune and is eventually imprisoned and persecuted by the vengeful father. His narrative closes as he sets off on still another impetuous quest.
This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans's introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 029918224X
• ISBN13: 9780299182243
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great Adventure

"Dangerous if read too late in life", Hemmingway.

Great Book

This is an excellent book if you can find it.

Poetic

I have just read this book and I think I could place it among the ones I liked the most (together with Gerald Durrell's ones): what I prefered was the poetic that filled the whole book , in the descriptions of landscapes, and people, that poetic you can't find in modern writers.

Men selected by nature

A window into a time and place where men culture and tools were formed by a harsh natural selection process. The wide open range wild herds of cattle and horses a few men isolated from civilization. Henry Hudson was there, his first impressions are from the viewpoint of an educated Englishman examining barbarians. He then gets immersed in the environment and sees the deeper human experience and the effects of total freedom and self reliance on the character of men

An adventure worthy to have been told and now read

If you are a fan of turn-of-the-century literature as I am, you will find this narrative a good read. I had never heard nor read anything about this Hudson fellow until I recently began to read "The Sun Also Rises", which, as you may know, is Ernest Hemingway's first novel. Hemingway nonchalantly mentions Hudson and the travels of Lamb briefly in his story. I was intrigued as I gathered Hemingway himself had read the book and apparently liked it well enough to mention. Or perhaps I am mistaken. Regardless, this book is really as series of tales of adventures in the jungles of South America. You meet the natives, the food, the lifestyle and the beautiful girls (as you might expect; latino woman are notably lovely, in my experience). It should be noted, however, that the author, being a product of his times no doubt, is not particularly sensitive to political correctness.