About the Author
Victoria Johnson is the author of three books, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist American Eden, Backstage at the Revolution, and most recently Glorious Country. She is a former Cullman Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow and is a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York City, where she teaches cultural, urban, and environmental history. Victoria Johnson holds a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale. She is a dynamic speaker who has been invited to deliver nearly 200 book talks in the US and the UK.
Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World, is the first-ever biography of Frederic Church (1826-1900). This sweeping, richly researched book illustrates how the great 19th-century American artist’s paintings of remote lands and seas thrilled American audiences and put the young republic on the map of world culture.
American Eden follows the untold story of Hamilton’s—and Burr’s—personal physician, whose dream to build America’s first botanical garden inspired the young Republic. Despite obstacles and near-constant resistance, David Hosack triumphed in 1810. Today what remains of America’s first botanical garden lies beneath the Rockefeller Center. Hosack was a botanist, conducted some of the first pharmaceutical research in the United States, and championed public health and science.
Contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau to book Victoria Johnson for speaking events as a keynote speaker. Use the Request a Speaker form or email info@simonspeakers.com to speak to Victoria Johnson’s booking agent to request her speaking fee, booking information, and availability.
Raves and Reviews
Praise for Glorious Country
In this absorbing biography of Frederic Church, Victoria Johnson exhibits a special intimacy with the creator of some of the most sublime landscape paintings in American history. She shadows him on his intrepid quests to remote and exotic places, then ably shows how those trips yielded imperishable art. Best of all, she dusts off the musty label of Hudson River School artist that has so often stigmatized Church and restores to us the original freshness and wonder of his work.”
—Ron Chernow, author of Mark Twain and Alexander Hamilton
Victoria Johnson is a gifted writer who gives us a fresh and thrilling Frederic Church—a man far removed from the stiff Victorian who has long populated art history books. She paints a portrait of a passionate, adventurous and profoundly talented man whose life is intricately woven together with the story of the American nation. In her deeply researched and vivid telling, we meet the ambitious painter, the loving husband and father, the intrepid traveler—and so many other incarnations of this extraordinary figure. Glorious Country is, well, glorious.”
—Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
A vivid writer and perceptive researcher, Victoria Johnson has the unique talents needed to illuminate the extraordinary life of a visionary artist, Frederic Church. Blending spirituality, science, art, and awe, Church crafted grand and intricate landscapes that placed humans within a nature teeming with life and beauty. He imagined a glorious country where Americans lived in harmony with the cosmos—a vision which now resonates as elegy.”
—Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars and The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia
Glorious Country is an ambitious, indispensable, and exciting biography that offers new vital interpretive analysis of this leading artist’s life and career. Johnson’s book provides a major contribution to the scholarship on nineteenth-century American art.”
—Elizabeth Kornhauser, Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Praise for American Eden
If Rockefeller Center is haunted, a likely candidate for the ghost is David Hosack, the doctor-botanist who assembled a major plant collection on the site starting in 1801…. Victoria Johnson’s American Eden unearths Hosack, who was lauded in his lifetime but largely forgotten since. Hosack’s Columbia lectures were, as one student said, “as good as the theater,” and so is Johnson’s storytelling. She weaves his biography with threads of history — political, medical and scientific — and the tale of an up-and-coming New York City. An innovative medical practitioner, he was the friend and doctor Hamilton and Burr had in attendance on that July morning along the Weehawken cliffs for their ill-starred duel. Did Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton leave you with an appetite for more? American Eden will not disappoint…. In her ambitious and entertaining book Johnson connects past to present. David Hosack’s garden may have been short-lived, but in our parks, gardens, medical practices and pharmacology, his efforts continue to bear fruit.”
—Marta McDowell, New York Times Book Review
Lucky is the biographer who can resurrect a forgotten figure and retrieve a major reputation lost to the passage of time. In this captivating and intensely readable book, Victoria Johnson rescues the remarkable life of Dr. David Hosack, physician and botanist extraordinaire and a towering benefactor of New York and the early republic. A welcome achievement.”
—Ron Chernow, author of Grant and Alexander Hamilton
You’ve listened to Hamilton, you devoured the Alexander Hamilton biography. But you might not have read up on David Hosack, the American botanist and doctor who accompanied Hamilton and Burr on their fateful duel. While he wasn’t paid in advance, he was treated with civility, and in American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, you can read more about his life as a pioneering botanist, pharmacologist, and surgeon.”
—Mary Beth Griggs, Popular Science
Victoria Johnson has written an engaging intellectual biography that weaves science into the story of America’s founding. American Eden is rich in insights, and it casts a vivid light on the astounding achievements of the nation’s first botanist.”
—Russell Shorto, author of Revolution Song and The Island at the Center of the World
