Travelling passions
Subtitle: the hidden life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
By: by Gísli Pálsson ; translated from the Icelandic by Keneva Kunz ; with a foreword by Adrienne Clarkson
Contributors: Kunz, Keneva
Edition: English ed
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press; University Press of New England
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Hanover, N.H
Language: eng
Number of pages: 374
Subjects: Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, -- 1879-1962; Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, -- 1879-1962 -- Relations with women; Explorers -- Canada -- Biography; Canada, Northern -- Discovery and exploration
Genres: Biography
Work titles: Frægð og firnindi.
Description: "Vilhjalmur Stefansson is widely known for his groundbreaking Canadian Arctic explorations of the early 1900s. He acquired a reputation almost larger than life with his discovery of the Copper Inuit - a hitherto unknown people - his insistence on living as the local people did, and, with Natkusiak, his Inuit co-explorer, his adventurous forays onto barren ice for months at a time. He was a fixture in the New York Greenwich Village scene and, later in his life, taught at Dartmouth College. However, despite his detailed field diaries and the frenzy of publicity that followed his every move, his private life has remained largely unknown." "Then, in 1987, an accidental discovery in a flea market of hundreds of private letters and documents proved to be those belonging to Stefansson, and they told a story of private relationships, in particular with two southern women, Orpha Cecil Smith, to whom Stefansson was engaged, and the novelist Fannie Hurst, with whom Stefansson was involved for many years. Moreover, letters between some of Stefansson's friends as well as his own field diaries alluded to an important relationship Stefansson had with an Inupiat woman in the Arctic, Pannigabluk, and to their son, Alex." "Gisli Palsson has followed the trail of these sources and conducted many interviews with Stefansson's northern descendants, uncovering a complex and perhaps torn personality. In Travelling Passions, we have a much more complete picture of the man who figured so largely in the imagination of the early twentieth century."--Jacket.
Notes: Translation of: Frægð og firnindi : ævi Vilhjálms Stefánssonar

Includes bibliographical references (p. [347]-365) and index