Francis Parkman is regarded by many students of American history and literature as the finest narrative historian America has yet produced. Among nineteenth-century histories, his seven-part, nine-volume France and England in North America retains a freshness and vitality for the modern reader rivaled only by Henry Adams's History of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-1891); and while Adams's work is admired, it does not enjoy the popularity, measured in terms of inexpensive modern editions, that parts of France and England in North America, especially LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West and Montcalm and Wolfe, do. Parkman is that rarity among historians, the storyteller read for pleasure as well as the scholar read for fact. Understanding his enduring success in a literary form in which so few writers survive their own day requires an understanding of his literary career as a whole, one of the more interesting in American letters.
