Impact of Bowen's Life and Autobiography
Although Bowen did not become a master of his own ship or have notable seafaring adventures for his time, his historical contribution is important. Because Bowen was the first American sailor to write an autobiography, his account gives historians valuable insight into life as an 18th century sailor. Bowen's autobiography and journal had been an important archival source for scholars and in 1973 it was edited by Phillip Chadwick Foster Smith and published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. More recently, in 2006, The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen was published by itself by Broadview Editions, edited with an Introduction by Daniel Vickers.
Read more about this topic: Ashley Bowen
Famous quotes containing the words impact of, impact, bowen and/or life:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him—a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured—captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)