Paul Revere's Ride: The Landlord's Tale

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Harper Collins, 2003 - Juvenile Nonfiction - 40 pages

"

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.... "

So begins Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's stirring tale of Paul Revere's ride and the first battle cry for American independence. Written over a century ago, the words still resonate today.

Now acclaimed artist Charles Santore has turned his attention to this historic event, immortalized in Longfellow's poem. Paul Revere, his horse, the Old North Church, the lantern, Lexington and Concord -- all spring from these pages, and make that famous race against time live once again.

About the author

During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed a popularity that few poets have ever known. This has made a purely literary assessment of his achievement difficult, since his verse has had an effect on so many levels of American culture and society. Certainly, some of his most popular poems are, when considered merely as artistic compositions, found wanting in serious ways: the confused imagery and sentimentality of "A Psalm of Life" (1839), the excessive didacticism of "Excelsior" (1841), the sentimentality of "The Village Blacksmith" (1839). Yet, when judged in terms of popular culture, these works are probably no worse and, in some respects, much better than their counterparts in our time. Longfellow was very successful in responding to the need felt by Americans of his time for a literature of their own, a retelling in verse of the stories and legends of these United States, especially New England. His three most popular narrative poems are thoroughly rooted in American soil. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), an American idyll; "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the first genuinely native epic in American poetry; and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), a Puritan romance of Longfellow's own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. "Paul Revere's Ride," the best known of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn"(1863), is also intensely national. Then, there is a handful of intensely personal, melancholy poems that deal in very successful ways with those themes not commonly thought of as Longfellow's: sorrow, death, frustration, the pathetic drift of humanity's existence. Chief among these are "My Lost Youth" (1855), "Mezzo Cammin" (1842), "The Ropewalk" (1854), "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1852), and, most remarkable in its artistic success, "The Cross of Snow," a heartfelt sonnet so personal in its expression of the poet's grief for his dead wife that it remained unpublished until after Longfellow's death. A professor of modern literature at Harvard College, Longfellow did much to educate the general reading public in the literatures of Europe by means of his many anthologies and translations, the most important of which was his masterful rendition in English of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67). Children's book illustrator Charles Santore was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1935. He won the 1998 Storytelling World Honor from Storytelling magazine for his book William the Curious and received the Hamilton King award from the New York Society of Illustrators. Santore's work is permanently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brandywine River Museum.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Paul Revere's Ride: The Landlord's Tale
• Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Illustrated by: Charles Santore
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 2003
• ISBN: 0688165524, 9780688165529
• Length: 40 pages
• Subjects: Juvenile Fiction / General; Juvenile Nonfiction / History / United States / Colonial & Revolutionary Periods; Juvenile Nonfiction / History / United States / General; Juvenile Nonfiction / Poetry / General; Poetry / General