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FOREWORD Doug Capra For seven short months —between late August 1918 and mid-March 1919 — Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son, also named Rockwell, lived on a small island in Resurrection Bay not far from Seward, Alaska.Their host and companion, a seventy-one-year-old Swede and Alaskan pioneer named Lars Matt Olson, described himself as "noting bott a brokendown Freunters Man." Lonely, and too old to prospect and trap as in his youthful days, Olson welcomed the Kents to his island home, where he ran a small fox and goat farm. Kent chronicled his adventures on Fox Island in this, his first book, which was published in 1920 to stellar reviews. The New Statesman said it was "easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass." The Chicago Post wrote: "the artist who can put into the simplest drawingsof a man and a little boy eating together at a rough table in a rough cabin all the dear solidity of family and home life —that artist can make me bow my head before his sincerity." Wilderness is perhaps Kent's most charming and lasting literary accomplishment . Robert Benchley in the New York World first summed up its almost mythical qualities: "Those who come back to the unlovely haunts of men after such a sojourn . . . bring with them something which makes them the envy of all urbanites. This something Rockwell Kent has brought back from Alaska and put into Wilderness." The gift Kent brought back from the Alaskan wild was nothing less nor more than himself, his own artistic voice and vision. "It seems," Kent writes, "that we have . . . turned out of the beaten , crowded way and come to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness; and here we found OURSELVES — for the wilderness is nothing else." Since its publication, Wilderness has stirred the imaginationsof countless artists, writers, and adventurers and influenced more than one of them to venture to Alaska. It is a book about art and life, about alienation and integration , about the inner life, the spiritual life, the simple life; and it is about growing old gracefully, without losing one's childhood ideals. In Wilderness, Kent confronts the emptiness and loneliness of the abyss and fills it with the richness and wealth of his soul. Almost nothing of the personal life Kent left in New York, nor his experiXI ences in the town of Seward, is included in Wilderness. This missing information adds much to an understanding of his life and gives us an interesting glimpse between the lines of what is written here. For Kent does leave us clues. In the preface to the first edition, he writes: "Deliberately I have begun this happy stow far out in Resurrection Bay; —and again dropped its peaceful thread on the forlorn threshold of the town." Olson, and others in Seward who read the book, understood this as a reference to Kent's battle with the town. Until recently, however, biographers and readers alike have either overlooked this cryptic remark or wondered at its obscurity. Born on June 21,1882, in Tarrytown Heights, New York, Rockwell Kent was a child of wealthy late-Victorian society. His father died when Kent was five years old, leaving him little more than his silver flute. Kent carried that flute with him throughout his life —to Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland. After his father's death, the family floundered between periods of affluence and genteel poverty, dependent on the charity of wealthy relatives . Kent rebelled early, as an account of his private schooling shows, but his mother's sister, a talented artist herself, nurtured his artistic gifts. Kent wanted to paint, but his practical family advised him to pursue a career as an architect . He studied architecture at Columbia University, but perfected his painting under mentors Abbott T'hayer, William Merritt Chase, and Robert Henri. He eventually dropped out of Columbia to pursue his painting full time. In 1905, Henri introduced Kent to the rugged cliffs of Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, twenty miles from Boothbay Harbor, marking the artist's early experience with the solitude of island life. He lived and painted there, built himself a small house —read Emerson, Thoreau, Dostoevski, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Haeckel —and worked as a laborer and lobsterman. In 1908, Kent married Kathleen Whiting, Abbott Thayer's niece, and began a twelve-year struggle to...

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