Popular and authoritative, Morison's life of Columbus remains a landmark after 75 years.

His subject’s record has become much more controversial over time, but, 75 years after publication, Samuel Eliot Morison’s life of Christopher Columbus remains a towering scholarly achievement.

Morison (1887-1976) was a Harvard-trained historian who spent forty years on the faculty and is remembered- inter alia- as the last professor to go to work on a horse. He was the first Harmsworth Professor of History at Oxford and spent his career collecting all the great gongs of his profession, including two each of the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes.

Among his works are a biography of John Paul Jones, the official US Navy history of World War II (15 vol, 1947-1962), textbooks on American history, and a groundbreaking biography of Columbus published 75 years ago.

To conduct research, Morison spent five months aboard a three-masted sailing ship, retracing the explorer’s routes 10,000 miles across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean. The resulting book, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (1942), made Morison’s name as a scholar who was not content to dwell in the archives. It also gave him entree. “That Columbus book...brought me a welcome from sailors everywhere,” he once said. “It did me more good than the [naval] commission. Columbus was my passport.”

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Morison, Samuel Eliot, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Atlantic/Little Brown, 1st ed., 1942). Standard life of the Italian explorer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket with some chipping and wear about the edges. Good condition. Octavo, 680 pp. HBB price: $95 obo.

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