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Francis Parkman: France and England in North America: Volume Two

Count Frontenac and New France | A Half-Century of Conflict | Montcalm and Wolfe

Edited by David Levin

“…These works are distinguished by Parkman’s vigorous and resourceful prose, alive with ingenious figurative language and resonant description. His method is basically novelistic: he renders specific dramatic scenes, invents appropriate dialogue, and describes his characters’ presumed thoughts and feelings. The result is a panorama that never dwarfs personalities—a demonstration of historical process that is, at the same time, deeply attentive to the human concerns that shaped it.” — The Christian Science Monitor

Overview

Overview

Save $30 when you buy both volumes of Parkman’s France and England in North America.

This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history of the American forest” is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. The story reaches its climax with the fatal confrontation of two great commanders at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham—and a daring stratagem that would determine the future of a continent.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) details how France might have won her imperial struggle with England. Frontenac, a courtier who was made governor of New France by that most sagacious of monarchs, oversaw the colony’s brightest era of growth and influence. Had Canada’s later governors possessed his administrative skill and personal force, his sense of diplomacy and political talent, or his grasp of the uses of power in a modern world, the English colonies to the south might have become part of what Frontenac saw as a continental scheme of French dominion.

England’s American colonies flourished, while France, in both the Old World and the New, declined from its greatness of the late seventeenth century. Conflict over the developing western regions of North America erupted in a series of colonial wars. As narrated by Parkman in A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), these American campaigns, while only part of a larger, global struggle, prepared the colonies for the American Revolution.

In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) Parkman describes the fatal confrontation of the two great French and English commanders whose climactic battle marked the end of French power in America. As the English colonies cooperated for their own defense, they began to realize their common interests, their relative strength, and their unique position. In this imperial war of European powers we also begin to see the American figures—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—soon to occupy a historical stage of their own.

Parkman’s chronicle of nearly two and a half centuries of conflict will permanently transform our image of the American landscape. Written with verve, suppleness, and wit, this grand narrative history of political and theological conflict, of feats of physical endurance, of courtly manners practiced with comic disproportion against the backdrop of a looming wilderness, is itself one of the still-undiscovered treasures of our national and of world literature.

David Levin (1924–1998), volume editor, was professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, In Defense of Historical Literature, and Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer: 1663–1703.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Francis Parkman: France & England in North America, Volume Two is kept in print by a gift from the Florence Gould Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-0-94045011-0 1620 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 12 Library of America Series

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