ANGLOSPHERIC EPIC:

Parkman was born in 1823 to a family eminent among Boston's Brahmin class. He was marked out early for a respectable career--perhaps as a Unitarian divine, like his father, or else as an attorney. But the muse of history had other plans: young Francis fell under its spell while a sophomore at Harvard, directing his first, precocious efforts toward a study of the French and Indian War. The ambition grew with the execution: "I enlarged the plan," he recounted in a later letter, "to include the whole course of the conflict between France and England; or, in other words, the history of the American forest. . . . my theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night."

The result was one of the most remarkable achievements in American letters. France and England in North America, published in six volumes across the span of three decades, astonished readers with its finely wrought prose and unerring command of historical detail. Beginning in the sixteenth century with his protagonists' first abortive efforts at colonization and ending on the Plains of Abraham 250 years later, Parkman's sprawling narrative elevated the contest for the continent to the level of epic.

Though Parkman published several other works, including a memoir of time spent on the Oregon Trail and a history of Pontiac's Rebellion, it is on France and England that his fame chiefly rests. Reviewers were quick to sense the magnitude of the accomplishment. The Atlantic pronounced it "a book for all mankind and for all time," on par with the works of Herodotus and Thucydides; later admirers included Oliver Wendell Holmes, C. Vann Woodward, and Edmund Wilson. And as recently as 1983, when the Library of America brought out its indispensable two-volume edition, the Washington Post declared it "the greatest history ever written by an American. . . . a thousand years from now, if there are still Americans, Parkman will be their Homer."

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