Mark Metzler Sawin introduces us to Elisha Kent Kane, an anxious, driven, sickly, brilliant, adventurous, and insecure young man who turned himself into a national icon. Though largely forgotten today, Kane was one of the most celebrated heroes in the mid-eighteenth century. He traveled to China, East Asia, North and South America, India, Europe, Africa, and the Arctic. He fought in the Mexican-American War, made two celebrated journeys to the far north in search of Sir John Franklin, and wrote one of the most successful books of the period.

Mark Metzler Sawin is an associate professor of U.S. History at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA. He has served as president of the Middle-Atlantic American Studies Association and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.