Drawing on literary masterworks and riveting firsthand narratives, travel writing and natural science, memoir and journalism, AMERICAN SEA WRITING captures the full sweep of America's maritime experience. From voyagers of the 17th century to ecological dilemmas of the 20th, from Cotton Mather and Washington Irving to Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez, the collection casts our national story in a new and revealing light. Here are many of our greatest writers: Cooper inventing the sea novel, Emerson on an Atlantic crossing; Poe recasting the Flying Dutchman legend; Whitman, Melville, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway all mining their sea experiences in vivid writing. Here too are eyewitness accounts of the dangers and wonders of the ocean and the drama of life aboard ship: William Bradford on the MAYFLOWER; Olaudah Equiano on a slave ship; Captain Cook's death on a Hawaiian beach; Lewis and Clark sighting the Pacific; the w! reck of the ESSEX and the GLOBE mutiny; Perry's voyage to Japan; the navy from colonial times to World War II; Joshua Slocum's solo voyage; William Beebe's deep-sea descent; John McPhee on the continuing vulnerability of ships today. Throughout, the collection uncovers neglected works of remarkable power: Celia Thaxter on the desolate beauty of the New England seacoast; Lafcadio Hearn's lush Gulf Coast seascapes; Henry Beston's meditation on waves; Rachel Carson exploring the interaction of sea and land; Joseph Mitchell's startling essay on what lies beneath New York harbor. AMERICAN SEA WRITING is a unique literary voyage in the company of some of our greatest writers.
About the Author
Peter Neill, editor, is president of the South Street Seaport Museum and of the International Congress of Maritime Museums.
Nathaniel Philbrick
Life at a Glance
Born
1956 in Boston, Mass.
Educated
Linden Elementary School and Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Pa.; BA in English from Brown University in Providence, RI, and an MA in America Literature from Duke University in Durham, NC
Sailing
Philbrick was Brown's first Intercollegiate All-American sailor in 1978; that year he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, RI; today he and his wife Melissa sail their Beetle Cat Clio and their Tiffany Jane 34 Marie-J in the waters surrounding Nantucket Island.
Married
Melissa Douthart Philbrick, who is an attorney on Nantucket. They have two children: Jennie, 23, and Ethan 20.
Career
After grad school, Philbrick worked for four years at Sailing World magazine; was a freelancer for a number of years, during which time he wrote/edited several sailing books, including Yaahting: A Parody (1984), for which he was the editor-in-chief; during this time he was also the primary caregiver for his two children. After moving to Nantucket in 1986, he became interested in the history of the island and wrote Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People. He was offered the opportunity to start the Egan Maritime Foundation in 1995, and in 2000 he published In the Heart of the Sea, followed by Sea of Glory, in 2003, and Mayflower, due in May 2006.
Awards and Honors
In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award for nonfiction; Revenge of the Whale won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; Sea of Glory won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the Albion-Monroe Award from the National Maritime Historical Society. Philbrick has also received the Byrne Waterman Award from the Kendall Whaling Museum, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for distinguished service from the USS Constitution Museum, the Nathaniel Bowditch Award from the American Merchant Marine Museum, and the William Bradford Award from the Pilgrim Society.
