Regarded as one of America's foremost travel writers, a respected poet, and author of what is often called "America's first gay novel," Pennsylvania-born Bayard Taylor set out for a trek across Scandinavia in 1855 with the intention of capturing native life so accurately on paper that readers would liken his prose to photographs. His letters containing the accounts of his journey were published in newspapers then republished under the title Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures. The book was published in London and New York in 1857. From this journey Taylor also got the material for his long, narrative poem "Lars."

Author Biography

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), American author, was born at Ken-nett Square in Chester county, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January 1825. His novel, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which he considered his most successful work despite it being re-ceived poorly by the public, recounts an intimate friendship between two men and is believed to be based on that between the poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The book is now regarded as the first American gay novel. It was published fifty-eight years be-fore British author Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928).