The Honor of the Big Snows

A Hudson's Bay Company man's wife dies at a lonely post in the far north, and the baby she leaves grows up in the care of her father and of Jan Thoreau, a starving boy with a violin who staggered in out of the snow on the night she died — and whose devotion to the girl becomes the whole of his life. Curwood was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north and write about it; this early novel of 1911 is the one where his snow country stops being scenery. Fifty-six plates of northern light and life, from Winslow Homer to Edvard Munch, keep the snow country of this romance before the eye.