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.