Includes bibliographical references (pp. 461-470).

"Evan Connell has long been attracted to the visionary and eccentric, to those people and events slightly outside the mainstream of human experience. His subjects are people of passion and purpose, events of legend and desire, the quixotic obsession for the new, the hidden, the unattainable." "These are tales of fabulous advances in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the great explorers Marco Polo, Columbus, Coronado, Henry Hudson, Ibn Batuta, Mary Kingsley, of eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course," Connell says, "because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard."" "This new volume includes the contents of two previous collections, The White Lantern and A Long Desire, together with two new essays not before collected in trade book form. The whole amounts to a dazzling monument to the career of one of America's finest writers."--BOOK JACKET.