The Hard Way Around
The Passages of Joshua Slocum
In 1895 Joshua Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the Spray, a thirty-seven-foot sloop. More than three years later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, and his account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, made him internationally famous. But scandal soon followed, and a decade later, with his finances failing, he set off alone once more—never to be seen again.
In this definitive portrait of an icon of adventure, Geoffrey Wolff describes, with authority and admiration, a life that would see hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, smallpox, and no shortage of personal tragedy.
Geoffrey Wolff is the author of six novels and six works of nonfiction, including the memoir The Duke of Deception, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1995 to 2006, he directed the Graduate Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. For his writing, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Bath, Maine.