William Henry Hudson was born in 1841 at Quilmes, near Buenos Aires, in Argentina. His childhood and youth were spent on his father's estancia on the Argentina pampas, from where he made many excursions into the remoter parts of the surrounding country, which was to provide ample material for books such as Argentine Ornithology, The Naturalist in La Plata and Idle Days in Patagonia. He moved to Britain in 1869 and, after a period of inaction and poverty, returned to his vocation as a field naturalist and began his prolific writing career. His best-known work is perhaps Green Mansions, a romance set in the wilds of South America, which has never been out of print. He died in London in 1922.
