Friedrich Gerstäcker was the major German author of fiction and reportage about America in the mid nineteenth century. One of the most adventurous and intrepid German travelers of his time, he ranged through North and South America and the South Seas from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and Tahiti to Australia, Java, and Egypt, writing unremittingly. He produced not only fiction and memoirs about these experiences but also social novels set in Germany, stories of fantasy and mystery, and even drama and some verse. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century he had an international reputation; in the United States his works were widely read in both German and English. After that, he gradually declined to the status of a children's writer and otherwise came to be forgotten except in connection with so-called ethnographic literature. Attention to him has, however, been reviving.

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Gerst...