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The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Handprint Books By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Engravings by Christopher Bing

12 x 9 in; 40 pp ; Ages 7-up
Hardcover
Published in October, 2001
ISBN 1929766130
ISBN13 9781929766130

$18.99  

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere -- In his magnificent interpretation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, Christopher Bing seamlessly weaves history and imagination into a rich portrait of an American hero. A meticulous researcher, Bing includes material that provides texture to history, maps that follow the British campaign to quell the rebellious citizenry, as well as the patriot’s ride into the Massachusetts night of April, 1775. Documents firmly affixed into the book, including the British general’s orders to his troops and Revere’s own deposition relating the events, give the reader not only a visual experience but a tactile one as well. Far more than a brilliantly presented history lesson, this book represents a tour de force of coherent artistic vision. In an extraordinary series of rich and moody “engravings,” from the mysteriously shimmering rigging of the British sloop, The Somerset, looming in a moonlit Boston harbor to the taut urgency of a man and his horse galloping at a combustible moment in the American experience, this book illuminates our country’s past unlike any other.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), a professor of French and Spanish at Harvard University, was one of the first American academics to have a truly global interest in literature. He became convinced that America was in need of its own mythology, poetic tradition, and epic forms, comparable to Homer and Virgil. To that end, he created The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Paul Revere's Ride (1860), and other epic poems, now considered masterpieces of American literature.

Christopher Bing Christopher Bing, whose first book, "Casey at the Bat," was named a 2001 Caldecott Honor Book, lives with his wife and three children in Lexington, Massachusetts, in a house directly on the Freedom Trail, the route on which Paul Revere rode on that fateful night of April 18th, two hundred twenty-six years ago.