SOURCE: "Audubon's Passion," The New Yorker, 5 February 1991, pp. 96-104.

In the following essay, originally published in 1991, Gopnik places Audubon's life and art in the context of American history and culture.

In 1803, an eighteen-year-old Frenchman who had been born in Haiti, as Jean Rabin, and who had lived in Paris just long enough to take a few drawing lessons and learn how to ice-skate, arrived in New York. For the next seventeen years, he wandered through Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Ohio and Louisiana, pursuing one quixotic money-making scheme after another. Then, in 1820, he was seized by what he afterward called his "Great Idea," and for the next thirty years—until his death, in 1851—he raced from Florida to Labrador, drawing a picture of every American bird and every American beast, beginning with the wild turkey, and including even such minor Americans as the knobbed-billed phaleris, the annulated marmot squirrel...