W. H. Hudson

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was born on a sheep farm near Quilmes, outside Buenos Aires, to American parents who had settled on the Argentine pampas, and spent his boyhood there studying its birds and wildlife in what was then a lawless frontier. He emigrated to England in 1874 and lived for years in poverty and obscurity, supporting himself partly through ornithological writing, before his adventure romance The Purple Land (1885) and the two-volume Argentine Ornithology (1888, with P. L. Sclater) began to establish him. He became a British subject in 1900 and spent his later career alternating between naturalist studies of the English countryside — Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909), A Shepherd's Life (1910) — and the exotic South American romance Green Mansions (1904), the story of a solitary traveller in the Guiana forest and the bird-like forest girl Rima, which became his best-known book and a founding influence on early literary environmentalism. He was a founding member of the (Royal) Society for the Protection of Birds, and died in London in 1922.