The Traveler

“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