Stone Breaker: The Poet James Gates Percival and the Beginning of Geology in New England - Hardcover

by Kathleen L. Housley (Author)

Percival probed the volcanic origins of rock via geology and the seething nature of his psyche via poetry

Stone Breaker is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Kathleen L. Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820's became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.

Author Biography

KATHLEEN L. HOUSLEY (Glastonbury, CT) is the author of nine books including Black Sand: The History of Titanium and The Scientific World of Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer: the Entanglement of Science, Religion, and Politics in Nazi Germany.