SOURCE: "Larger than Life," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. VII, No. 9, December 1, 1966, pp. 16, 18, 20, 22-4.

Mumford was an American sociologist, historian, philosopher, and author. In the following essay, he reviews John James Audubon: A Biography by Alexander B. Adams (1966). Rejecting Adams's contention that Audubon was overly concerned with money-making, Mumford insists instead that his only true passion was the study of birds.

The life of John James Audubon was full of ambiguities, contradictions, frustrations, alienations. With such attributes, his biography could easily meet the fashionable specifications of our own period. But he was also a man of heroic mold, and heroes for the moment are not fashionable. What is worse for his present fame, he was, within his strict avian limits, a skilled draughtsman, indeed a consummate artist; and that is a severe disqualification in an age populated by solemn popcorny jokesters who transfer nothingness to...