The Course of Empire

BERNARD AUGUSTINE DEVOTO (1897-1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West. Born on January 11, 1897 in Ogden, Utah, he briefly attended the University of Utah before transferring to Harvard University in 1918. He served in the Army during WWI before graduating in 1920 and began his career as an English instructor at Northwestern University. He started writing articles and novels and, in 1927, moved to Massachusetts with his wife Avis, where he dedicated himself to serious writing whilst instructing part-time role at Harvard University. He wrote influential articles for periodicals, including the regular column ‘The Easy Chair’ for Harper’s Magazine, which he wrote from 1935 until his death in New York City on November 13, 1955, aged 58. DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Twain’s papers. This work culminated in several publications, including the best-selling Letters From the Earth (1962). From 1936-1938 he served as editor of the Saturday Review of Literature in New York. He gained fame for his popular histories of the West, including Across the Wide Missouri (1947), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1948; The Course of Empire (1952), winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1953; and a popular abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). ERWIN RAISZ (1893-1968) was an American cartographer, best known for his physiographic maps of landforms. Born in Lőcse, Hungary on March 1, 1893, he received his degree in civil engineering and architecture from the Royal Polytechnicum in Budapest in 1914. After serving in the army during WWI he immigrated to New York in 1923 and studied for his 1929 Ph.D. at Columbia University. In 1931 he joined Harvard University, where he taught cartography and was curator of the map collection for 20 years. He died in Bangkok, Thailand on December 1, 1968, aged 75.