Out-Doors at Idlewild; or The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson

<p><b>Chronicles the creation of a picturesque home and landscape on the Hudson River by one of the nineteenth century's leading authors.</b></p><p>During the 1850s and '60s by far the most prominent author in all of New York State was the writer editor and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867). Nearly as prominent as Willis himself was his Hudson Valley estate Idlewild where literary elites gathered and about which Willis himself wrote and published extensively. In 1846 Willis founded the <i>Home Journal</i> which would go on to become <i>Town and Country</i>. In <i>Out-Doors at Idlewild</i> first published in 1855 Willis chronicled the creation of his estate at Cornwall-on-Hudson (near West Point) as well as life amid its countryside. The land afforded brilliant views of the river and the mountains to the East. Calvert Vaux the famed architect of both landscapes and houses designed the elaborate and ornate Gothic Revival home which Willis named <i>Idlewood</i> (whereas he called the estate <i>Idlewild</i>) and into which the Willis family moved in July of 1853. Here Willis wrote a series of papers for the <i>Home Journal</i> documenting life at the seventy-acre estate. These papers were gathered together in <i>Out-Doors at Idlewild</i> a celebration of Willis's home and estate.</p>