The Traveler

“George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of [and] the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler, a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve. . . . The Traveler thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this ‘liberal thinker far ahead of his time.’” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book Review

“A revelatory account of the life of George Forster, whose rejection of racial hierarchies stood out amongst his peers. . . . The richness of Wulf’s research—drawn from Forster’s personal correspondence, diaries and essays, as well as those of his contemporaries—injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs.” —Nick Bartlett, The Guardian

“George Forster, a celebrity intellectual in his day, was a man far ahead of his time. In this thrilling biography-cum-adventure story, Andrea Wulf deftly shows us how Forster’s far-flung wanderings inspired and nurtured one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment era.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea

“The dauntless Andrea Wulf has gone adventuring, and returned with this enthralling account of young, nomadic George Forster. Her superb narrative shimmers with scholarly detail and magnificently sustains the ‘breathless exhilaration’ of his journeys, his extraordinarily liberal and observant mind and the intense emotional drama of his life. A combination of panoramic travelogue and tender psychological study animated at every point by Wulf’s own travels and research, The Traveler is hypnotically successful and wonderfully restores George Forster as a major historical figure of early European Romanticism.” —Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder

“A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it!” —Tom Holland, cohost of The Rest Is History and author of Rubicon

“Andrea Wulf belongs to the small, splendid canon of writers unafraid to render fact with feeling—The Traveler is a work of devotion and rigor that celebrates the courage to look past the horizon of an era’s givens and refuses to take the figments of a culture for facts.” —Maria Popova, author of Traversal

“Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the global range of his curiosity, and the poignant wilderness of his family life. This book is the memorial that he has long deserved.” —Neil MacGregor, author of Germany

“With her beautiful, sensitive, impressively researched biography of George Forster, Andrea Wulf brilliantly narrates the novelistic life of a uniquely curious scholar at a pivotal moment in Western Civilization, a man who embodied the notion that travel breeds empathy. Forster’s unquestioning love for his fellow human being, as recounted by Wulf, is a much-needed antidote to the vitriol that courses through present times.” —Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth

“As George Forster circumnavigates the globe, Wulf circumnavigates the Enlightenment mind in all its complexity, making for a doubly brilliant and breathtaking adventure.” —Sue Prideaux, author of Wild Thing

“A revelatory biography of the little remembered but brilliant polymath and naturalist George Forster. . . . In a narrative that reads partly like a scientific adventure story, partly like a revolutionary bildungsroman, Wulf traces Forster’s mental journey—drawing on his published works and private diaries and letters—as well as his literal journey, following his path throughout Europe and the South Pacific, trying to imagine the world from his perspective as ‘a crosser of borders, a dreamer of worlds’ who was able to see ‘the connections rather than divisions.’ Readers will be rapt by this immersive recreation of an intellectual awakening.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wulf amply restores [George Forster’s] stature as a brilliant mind. A stirring, empathetic portrait. . . . His curiosity, tolerance, and humaneness contrasted sharply with the perspective of his Eurocentric contemporaries.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)