Hudson, William Henry (1841–1922)

William Henry Hudson (b. 4 August 1841; d. 18 August 1922), British naturalist and writer. Born on a farm near Buenos Aires to American parents, William Henry Hudson spent the majority of his youth on the Argentine pampas before emigrating to England in the late 1860s. He lived a good part of his life in poverty and obscurity until the publication in 1885 of his first novel, The Purple Land that England Lost. This book, characteristic of his early work, was a romantic fiction set in Latin America, filled with detailed descriptions of the natural beauty of the region. Hudson's ideas were apparently shaped largely by his reading of Darwin and a belief in the ultimate authority of nature.

Although Hudson's writing had not gained a wide audience, he established friendships with several influential literary figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. He followed his early romances with several works of fiction as well collections of essays and studies of the natural sciences. Among Hudson's most acclaimed works are A Hind in Richmond Park (1922), Green Mansions (1904), Birds of La Plata (1920), and his autobiographical writings, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) and Far Away and Long Ago (1918).

Commercial success eluded Hudson until late in life, when, in the years before and after World War I, he wrote stories of English rural life expressing his philosophy of acquiescence to nature, a philosophy which would gain influence as the naturalistic movements of the twentieth century progressed.

See alsoForeign Travelers in Latin America; Literature: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Miller, W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise (1990).

Amy D. Ronner, W. H. Hudson: The Man, the Novelist, the Naturalist (1986).

Additional Bibliography

Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. El mundo maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2001.

                                       John Dudley