With a historian's attention to fact and a novelist's gift for the dramatic, Silverberg brings the legend of El Dorado to life once more.

Who is Mary Butts? A novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer whose work appeared in Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review and Ezra Pound's Little Review, hailed critically to be the "English Chekhov" in the 1920s and likened to the company of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Yet, in the vagrancies of the literary world (or maybe because the female writer quota had been filled) her work disappeared from view after her death in 1937. This collection of critical essays, interviews, and reappraisals by Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and ten others brings Butts out of the anecdotal confines of other peoples biographies (she drank with Hemingway, was sketched by Cocteau, and Virginia Woolfe hated her perfume), resurrecting an original modernist. But don't take the critics' word for it; also included are selected short fiction, essays, reviews, and poems, as less as a "checklist" of published writings by and about Mary Butts. Lacks an index.
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One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New Worlds exploration is that of the Land of Gold. Its mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); it drove some men mad with greed and, often as not, to their deaths. In this amazing history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores, licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela; to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin; to the nearly miraculous voyage of Orellana as far as the mouth of the Amazon (where he encountered the warlike women, who, according to his chronicler, gave the river its name); violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh (and a host of others) spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado. It was the naturalist Humboldt in the nineteenth century who turned attention back to Lake Guatavita, where gold was indeed found - though much less than the mythic El Dorado. Too little, in fact, to be worth the cost of extracting it. And so the legend died. With the historian's attention to fact and the novelist's gift for the dramatic, Silverberg recreates the legend of El Dorado.

Includes bibliographical references and index.