![]() ![]() The book has a deal too much of that regurgitated research, but it’s saved from tedium by the fact that Taylor has a very entertaining grasp of his main character, who comes across as a dimmer, less funny version of Huck Finn: Louis to California in the 1849 Gold Rush, a standard spine of travel-novel around which Taylor was free to deck all the period-research he’d done piecemeal over the course of two decades. It’s the story the titular young hero, who follows the pioneer wagon train west from St. It’s a pure demonstration of sic transit gloria mundi that the book and its author are now completely forgotten. ![]() It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign) it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise ( The New York Times called it “tremendously exciting,” the old Boston Transcript praised its “grubby verisimilitude,” and the San Francisco Chronicle, perhaps inevitably, referred to its “rollicking good humor”) it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (undeservedly, it must be admitted – good as it is, it’s not a patch on Mary Renault’s The King Must Die) and it spawned a popular TV series. ![]() Our book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. ![]()
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