Biography Essay

Few authors, as George Saintsbury has observed, have acquired fame through such different volumes as Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler and his collected Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert. Walton, it must be added, did not anticipate a serious 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 finds exuberant expression throughout The Compleat Angler, may perhaps be attributed at least in part to a childhood spent (like Shakespeare's) in the Midlands. Walton was christened on 21 September 1593 in Stafford, to which his father, Gervase Walton, an alehousekeeper, had migrated shortly before. He lost his father at the age of three. In 1598 his mother, Anne, married an innkeeper who later became a...