British Birds (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Though he never visited Venezuela himself, William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was born and raised in South America, on the pampas of Argentina. His parents were emigrants from the United States who bought a ranch not far from Buenos Aires. Young Hudson’s great interest was natural history, particularly birds. He read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and works of other naturalists when he was quite young, and he collected bird specimens for the Smithsonian Institution, He left for England in 1874, where he lived for decades in great poverty, struggling to make a living as a writer; he married his boardinghouse landlady and in 1900 became a British citizen. Among his publications were novels (beginning with The Purple Land in 1885), short-story collections, ornithological studies and personal reminiscences, but none, including Green Mansions in 1904, lifted him out of poverty. It was only in 1916, when he was seventy-five, that Green Mansions was reprinted to great acclaim—the first book published by Alfred A. Knopf—making Hudson almost overnight a literary celebrity. Among his later books, Far Away and Long Ago: History of My Early Life (1918) was perhaps the most praised.