How I Found Livingstone

In 1869 the New York Herald handed a young reporter an assignment that was equal parts simple and absurd: go to Africa and find David Livingstone, who had not been heard from in years. Henry Morton Stanley’s account of that search runs from Zanzibar into the interior through swamp, fever, desertion, and local war, to the meeting at Ujiji in November 1871 that gave English one of its most quoted greetings. Stanley writes like the newspaperman he was, fast and self dramatizing, and the book is as much about his own hunger to matter as about the man he found. The four months he spent at Livingstone’s side afterward give it a surprisingly tender ending. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.