Rockwell Kent
American, 1882–1971
Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, 1920
Revised signed and numbered edition, Ward Ritchie Press,1970
Private collection
Rockwell Kent documented his day-to-day survival and art making in Wilderness, a diary of his nine-month sojourn during 1918 and 1919 with his nine-year-old son. It reflects the writings of the American transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) celebrated self-reliance and an intimate relationship to nature.