Life and Work
Hudson was born in the Quilmes, a borough (partido) of the greater Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife Catherine née Kemble, U.S. settlers of English and Irish origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms.
Hudson settled in England during 1874. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888–1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Day (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
He was a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Hudson's best known novel is Green Mansions (1904), and his best known non-fiction is Far Away and Long Ago (1918). Ernest Hemingway famously referred to Hudson's book The Purple Land in his novel The Sun Also Rises.
In Argentina, Hudson is considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. A town in Berazategui Partido and several other public places and institutions are named after him.
Towards the end of his life, Hudson moved to Worthing in Sussex, England. His grave is in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing.
Read more about this topic: William Henry Hudson
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or work:
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.”
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“But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)