N by E
A painter sails a small boat to Greenland in 1929, wrecks it, and stays. Illustrated throughout with his own woodcuts, written as starkly as he drew.
The painter’s account of sailing a small boat to Greenland in 1929, the wreck that ended the voyage, and the months that followed among Greenlanders, illustrated throughout with his own woodcuts. Kent wrote as starkly as he drew. He had gone north partly to escape the New York art world that had just declared him a success, and the book is as much about that flight as about the ice.
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Maria Popova
Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) labored at his singular paintings and prints in solitude, in penury, in obscurity for decades. When the New York art world declared him an overnight success, largely thanks to his transcendent account of nine months on a remote Alaskan island, he left the city and moved to a quiet farmstead upstate, then left the continent, returning to the austere solitudes of the Arctic to paint, write, and reflect on the meaning of it all. In a lovely passage from N by E (public library) — his altogether exquisite 1930 memoir of the year he spent in the far north, rife with wisdom on how to be more alive — he models that courage, recounting a thrift store encounter that stands as a scale model of the disorientation of success.
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