In the way of many transplants to California, English-born Eadweard Muybridge (1830–94) reinvented himself a few times-changing his name, for example, from the slightly less exotic Edward James Muggeridge-before settling down in San Francisco in 1855. That’s a tall claim, but Solnit ( Wanderlust, 2000, etc.) defends it capably, if sometimes obliquely. Solnit was also awarded Harvard's Mark Lynton History Prize in 2004 for River of Shadows.Gracefully written, thoroughly well-considered life of the 19th-century California immigrant whose strange experiments in photography yielded both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. River of Shadows received a positive response from critics, including Jim Lewis of the New York Times, who called the book "deeply intelligent".įor River of Shadows, Solnit was honored with the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the 2004 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, which honors exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience. While it contains elements of history and biography, it also contains many explorations of topics like the history of timekeeping itself that are related to the main ideas of the book. Solnit has stated in an interview with the Believer that she considers herself a modern essayist, and River of Shadows is reflective of that style. In 11 chapters, Solnit examines how the telegraph, the railroad, photography, and the science of geology all changed how humans understood time and situates Muybridge's role in history and his technological innovations within this context.
At the same time, his lifespan is also situated in a period and place during which the world around him was changing rapidly and, Solnit argues, in which human experience of time was also changing as a result of new technology. Muybridge's life story itself seems to hinge on three major crises: his carriage accident, his murder of his wife's lover, and his break with patron Leland Stanford. In an interview with PBS, Solnit explains that Muybridge was born in 1830, the same year the first passenger railway ran in England and thus his life spans from the birth of the railroad through the birth of aviation technology.
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