George Saintsbury once observed that few authors have acquired fame through such different volumes as Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) and The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670). Walton, one hastens to add, did not anticipate a career as a man of letters. Any account of his life must, accordingly, trace both his evolution into a writer and the influences and experiences that led to such diverse masterpieces.

Walton's fascination with nature, which receives exuberant expression throughout The Compleat Angler, may, perhaps, be attributed in part to a childhood spent in the Midlands. The youngest of three children, he was christened on 21 September 1593 in Stafford, to which his father, Gervase, a "tippler" (pub keeper), had migrated a short time before. His father died when Walton was three. In 1598 his mother, Anne, married an innkeeper who later became a burgess of...