THE WORKS by PARKMAN, FRANCIS - 1885-86

Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1885-86. 210 x 140 mm. (8 1/4 x 5 1/2"). 10 volumes..
Quite pleasing contemporary half calf, attractively gilt, marbled sides, edges, and endpapers, raised bands, gilt spine compartments with cornerpiece volutes and botanical centerpiece, red and olive morocco labels. With two frontispiece portraits, 14 single-page maps, and six double-page maps. Leather at corners variably (sometimes rather) torn and abraded, joints a bit rubbed (but with nothing approaching a crack), a few scuffs and small stains to spines, but still quite a pretty set, the spines especially bright, and the marbled paper boards and text in mint condition.

This is an appealing set of the works of the important American historian Francis Parkman (1823-93), comprising "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," "The Jesuits in North America," "The Oregon Trail," "Count Frontenac," "The Old Régime in Canada," "Pioneers of France in the New World," "Montcalm and Wolfe," and "The Conspiracy of Pontiac." A person of independent means, Parkman studied at Harvard, but left without a degree. Pursuing a personal interest in Indians and the wilderness, he set off with his cousin in 1846 on a six-month journey on the Oregon Trail. He lived with the Sioux and met a wide range of hunters, trappers, and other frontier types who would figure in his histories. But then his health degenerated, and he had to stop travelling. For much of his adult life, Parkman was afflicted with a nervous disorder that allowed work to be done for only very short periods of time, and, on top of that, he became virtually blind. Although unable to see the research materials he had to use, he persevered, sometimes writing only a few lines a day, and always relying on assistants to read aloud to him. Parkman dictated his first book, "The Oregon Trail," to his cousin, and other works, however laboriously produced, followed. ANB says that "in the conception and execution of his work, Parkman was primarily an artist, with the result that his history has an enduring place in literature.".