The Playground of Europe by Leslie Stephen

The Playground of Europe by Leslie Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen (November 28, 1832-February 22, 1904) was an English author, critic, and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Literary career: While at Cambridge, Stephen became an Anglican clergyman. In 1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, and after a visit to the United States two years earlier, where he had formed lasting friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, he settled in London and became a journalist, eventually editing the Cornhill Magazine in 1871, where R. L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W. E. Norris, Henry James, and James Payne figured among his contributors. In his spare time, he participated in athletics and mountaineering. He was already known as a climber, as a contributor to Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1862), and as one of the earliest presidents of the Alpine Club, when in 1871, in commemoration of his own first ascents in the Alps, he published The Playground of Europe, which immediately became a mountaineering classic, drawing - together with Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps - successive generations of its readers to the Alps. Mountaineering: Stephen was one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of alpinism (the period between Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Whymper's ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865), during which many major alpine peaks saw their first ascents. Joining the Alpine Club in 1857, Stephen made the first ascent, with various other climbers and usually in the company of his favorite Swiss guide Melchior Anderegg, of the following peaks: Wildstrubel, Bietschhorn, Rimpfischhorn, Alphubel, Bluemlisalphorn, Schreckhorn, Monte Disgrazia, Zinalrothorn, and Mont Mallet.

The Author: Brian D. Stenfors is Director of Development at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara, California. A graduate of Drew University's innovative Ph.D. Program in Nineteenth-Century Studies (-The Formation of Modern Culture-), he has utilized the knowledge and critical skills gained from this experience to foster the ideals and vision of a free and democratic society by working in the not-for-profit sector, hoping to help assure that both individual expression and the arts, especially classical music, remain essential parts of American society and everyday life.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781597314022
ISBN 10	1597314021
Title	The Playground of Europe
Author	Leslie Stephen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Archivum Press
Year published	2007-12-18
Number of pages	284
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.