Frederick Law Olmsted's career as a landscape architect was long
and varied. The best-known fruits of that career were surely the
great urban parks: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in
Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston. But most of this took place
after the Civil War. Prior to 1865, Olmsted had built a public
reputation as an author and journalist (producing three
historically important books on slavery and the antebellum South)
and as General Secretary of the Sanitary Commission of the Union
Forces, the committee in charge of organizing medical treatment for
the military during the war. He had also previously been an
apprentice merchant, a seaman, a farmer, and manager of a mining
plantation in California. His life had been marked by innumerable
illnesses and accidents. His personality was notable for its
contentiousness and obsessiveness.
Working from Olmsted's own personal and professional writings,
Melvin Kalfus seeks to establish in this, the first biography of
Olmstead to appear in a decade and a half, the connections between
the many facets of Olmstead's life and work. Kalfus shows how
Olmsted's childhood afflictions provided him with the inner sources
of his creative imagination, provided the symbolism that was the
linguistic and visual vocabulary employed in his work, fired his
ambition, and led him so obsessively to seek the world's esteem
through his works. Finally, Kalfus argues that Olmsted's individual
psychodynamics fitted him uniquely to the role of the creative
professional in public life-- the agent (or "delegate") for his
society's needs-- needs that were unspoken as well as spoken.
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