Under a Wild Sky

In the century and a half since John James Audubon's death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was -- or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America. Before Audubon, ornithological illustrations depicted scaled-down birds perched in static poses. Wheeling beneath storm-racked skies or ripping flesh from newly killed prey, Audubon's life-sized birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. The wildness in the images matched the untamed spirit in Audubon -- a self-taught painter and self-anointed aristocrat who, with his buckskins and long hair, wanted to be seen as both a hardened frontiersman and a cultured man of science. In truth, neither his friends nor his detractors ever knew exactly who Audubon was or where he came from. Tormented by the ambiguities surrounding his birth, he reinvented himself ceaselessly, creating a life as dramatic as his fictionalizations of it.

Prize history

• Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2005 Finalist