Influence and Legacy
Books such as the Young Voyagers had great popularity, especially with boys. He was also very popular around the world; his tales of the American West captivated children everywhere, including Europe and Russia. Among his books, many of which were popular in translation in Poland and Russia, were The Rifle Rangers (1850), Scalp Hunters (1851), Boy Hunters (1853), War Trail (1851), Boy Tar (1859), and Headless Horseman (1865/6). Vladimir Nabokov recalled The Headless Horseman as a favourite adventure novel of his childhood years - "which had given him a vision of the prairies and the great open spaces and the overarching sky." At 11, Nabokov even translated The Headless Horseman into French alexandrines. Czeslaw Milosz also cites Russian translations of Reid as well-remembered early reading matter, which allowed him to learn Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. A chapter on Reid appears in his Emperor of the Earth (1976) collection of essays.
Russell Miller, in his biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, credits Mayne Reid as being one of Conan Doyle's favorite childhood authors and a great influence on Conan Doyle's writings.
Although Mayne Reid called himself, and is listed often as, "captain", Francis B. Heitman's definitive Historical Register and Dictionary of the U.S. Army only shows lieutenant.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Mayne Reid
Famous quotes containing the words influence and, influence and/or legacy:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)