Far Away and Long Ago

W. H. Hudson was seventy-six and ill in bed when the whole of his Argentine childhood came back to him, and he wrote it down in six weeks. What he remembered was the pampas of the 1840s: the famous row of ombu trees beside the house, flamingos and armadillos, gauchos and horse thieves, a plague of rats, an old plainsman who had seen too much, and the slow dread of a boy first understanding that he would die. It is a naturalist’s memoir, exact about birds and grasses, but what carries it is the recovery of early perception in its pure state, which is why readers from Conrad to Galsworthy counted it among the finest autobiographies in English. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.