Curtis, Edward S.:

Inquire · Offered by William Reese Company

THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN BEING A SERIES OF VOLUMES PICTURING AND DESCRIBING THE INDIANS OF THE UNITED STATES AND ALASKA WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, AND PUBLISHED BY EDWARD S. ... A complete subscriber's set of Curtis' monumental work, copy number 341, uniformly printed on Japanese vellum. The grandest illustrated work ever produced in the United States, the most important illustrated work on American Indians, and the single greatest book in Western Americana. Only the elephant folio edition of Audubon's The Birds of America equals Curtis in its massive ambition and execution in all of printed Americana. The extraordinary work is a tribute to the photographer's genius and unquenchable resolve, in the face of all obstacles, to bring the project to a triumphant conclusion.Edward Curtis was fascinated with the story of the American Indian from an early age, honing his knowledge of them and skill as a photographer on numerous scientific expeditions in the 1890s. With the enthusiastic backing of President Theodore Roosevelt (who wrote the foreword), Curtis evolved his plan for a comprehensive work which would illustrate his romantic vision of American Indian life before the disastrous impact of European contact. He obtained the patronage of J. Pierpont Morgan, whose support (and later that of his son) enabled the project to go forward. What had originally been projected to take five or six years stretched to twenty-three, consumed $1,200,000 (a third in subsidy from the Morgans), and cr

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