George Kennan's travels to Siberia resulted in his two best travel books. Tent Life in Siberia, and Adventures among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia (1870) established his reputation as a travel writer and became one of the most popular travel books in nineteenth-century America. Siberia and the Exile System (1891), a work that provided the most detailed exposé of the atrocities and injustice of the czarist method for punishing political prisoners, established Kennan as a champion of Russian political exiles and an expert in Russian affairs. Tent Life in Siberia has a tender charm while the later book, which Kennan's biographer Frederick F. Travis has called "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of Siberian exile," has a forceful though sympathetic authority which leaves the reader absolutely convinced of the injustices perpetrated by czarist Russia.

Born in Norwalk, Ohio, the son of attorney John Kennan and Mary...