Overview
The original text was written in French, first published in 1951, and has been translated to a number of languages. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith translated the book from French into English in 1952.
The expedition was the first to attain the summit of one of the eight-thousanders -- peaks higher than 8,000 meters, all located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia. Members of the expedition included Lionel Terray, Louis Lachenal, and Gaston Rébuffat then regarded as some of the finest mountaineers in the world, now regarded as among the finest ever.
Although there had been earlier internationally famous Himalayan mountaineers, like George Mallory in the 1920s, with the publication of Annapurna, Herzog became the first living mountaineering celebrity known to the general public.
The book, with its famous exhortation that "there are other Annapurnas in the lives of men" inspired a generation of climbers.
Read more about this topic: Annapurna (book)