Volume 4, Number 5 · April 8, 1965
America's Heroic Moment
By Marius Bewley
Meriwether Lewis: A Biography
by George Dillon
Coward-McCann, 364 pp., $6.95
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
edited by Bernard DeVoto
Houghton Mifflin, 504 pp., $6.50
Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents 1783-1854
edited by Donald Jackson
University of Illinois, 728 pp., $
In many ways Meriwether Lewis and William Clark have fared well at the hands of scholars, editors, and biographers. In 1953 Bernard DeVoto made an excellent condensation of the costly eight volumes of the Original Journals edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, and in 1962 the University of Illinois Press published a volume, beautifully edited by Mr. Donald Jackson, and of almost startling interest and readability, Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, With Related Documents, 1783-1854. In addition there have been several good monographs and a few biographies of more or less popular cast. Mr. Dillon's new biography of Lewis is the best of these, based very solidly on the Original Journals and the Letters. It is a creditable performance, and no doubt it needed to be done. But life is not long enough for most readers to devote more than a modest portion of it to reading about Lewis and Clark, and in the hours or days available for this purpose it would seem better to resort to DeVoto's condensation of the Journals and Donald Jackson's edition of the Letters. To say this is to imply no serious criticism of Mr. Dillon's very interesting book.
Review, 2448 words
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