A PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF LIFE AT SEA.

Here is an unforgettable page from the book of American history, complete with the lusty episodes which have become so much a part of sea stories. Two Years Before the Mast is the journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., during the years 1834-1836, when he was at sea. Through his eyes, the reader becomes a part of two memorable voyages; he sees the young Americas eagerly pushing back their frontiers; he rounds the treacherous Cape Horn and gazes upon the wild, foreign beauty of Spanish California. He shares Dana’s delight with the solitude and majesty of the ocean.

In her Introduction, May Lamberton Becker says that Dana’s book was such a vivid, unbiased, first-hand report of life at sea in the 1830’s that it instantly leaped into popularity as the best American sea story ever written, and this popularity it has never lost.

In such museums as the Carnegie Institute, the Brooklyn Museum , the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, you can see the work of Alexander Dobkin. To the illustrations which he has done for Two Years Before the Mast  Mr Dobkin has brought the same superb artistry which has made him one of our leading contemporary painters.