Memoirs and reflections of a distinguished author, teacher, and scholar from his childhood in Xenia, Ohio to his thirty years at Harvard and beyond.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for the New York Times, and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations--including intimate accounts of the daily lives of...