Synopses & Reviews
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"It is a magnificent epic," said William H. Prescott after the publication of History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843. Since then, his sweeping account of Cortés's subjugation of the Aztec people has endured as a landmark work of scholarship and dramatic storytelling. This pioneering study presents a compelling view of the clash of civilizations that reverberates in Latin America to this day.
----"Regarded simply from the standpoint of literary criticism, the Conquest of Mexico is Prescott's masterpiece," judged his biographer Harry Thurston Peck. "More than that, it is one of the most brilliant examples which the English language possesses of literary art applied to historical narration. . . . Here, as nowhere else, has Prescott succeeded in delineating character. All the chief actors of his great historic drama not only live and breathe, but they are as distinctly differentiated as they must have been in life. Cortés and his lieutenants are persons whom we actually come to know in the pages of Pres-cott. . . . Over against these brilliant figures stands the melancholy form of Montezuma, around whom, even from the first, one feels gathering the darkness of his coming fate. He reminds one of some hero of Greek tragedy, doomed to destruction and intensely conscious of it, yet striving in vain against the decree of an inexorable des-
tiny. . . . [Prescott] transmuted the acquisitions of laborious research into an enduring monument of pure literature."
Synopsis
The Modern Library reintroduces William Prescott's epic histories of the European conquests of Mexico and Peru.
William Hinkling Prescott's monumental histories were available for many years in a single volume in the Modern Library. Now the works are republished as two books with new, more readable typesetting.
Prescott (1796-1859) wrote a number of vibrant and minutely researched histories of the Spanish-speaking world. The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) tells of the subjugation between 1519 and 1529 of the whole Aztec people by Cortes and his group of a few hundred soldiers. Prescott also provides an analysis of the civilization that was destroyed as a result. Similarly, The History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) tells of Pizarro's expedition that led to the European domination of the Incas. Prescott never ventured any nearer to Spain than the Azores, but he learned the languages he needed for his histories, and used secretaries and assistants to help him read and write after an accident left him with drastically impaired sight. These works survive as great history and marvelously compelling literature.