Background
George Douglas was born on December 8, 1868 in Thüringen, Austria-Hungary. He was the son of John Sholto, a manager of cotton mills, and Vanda (von Poelnitz) Douglass.
(Norman Douglas’s first travel book, Siren Land is an homa...)
Norman Douglas’s first travel book, Siren Land is an homage to a part of the world that captivated the author more than any other. Weaving the myths of the Sirens into the landscape and history of the region, Douglas writes with knowledge and an irrepressible exuberance of the past and the present, of legends and archaeology, folklore and daily life, patron saints, local ghosts, wine, and the wind. Norman Douglas’s first travel book, Siren Land is an homage to a part of the world that captivated the author more than any other. Weaving the myths of the Sirens into the landscape and history of the region, Douglas writes with knowledge and an irrepressible exuberance of the past and the present, of legends and archaeology, folklore and daily life, patron saints, local ghosts, wine, and the wind.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1848850018/?tag=2022091-20
1911
(First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive ...)
First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it must have constituted a protracted and frightening ordeal--frightening, that is, to anyone except someone like Douglas, possessed of a more than normal share of guts and fortitude." First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it must have constituted a protracted and frightening ordeal--frightening, that is, to anyone except someone like Douglas, possessed of a more than normal share of guts and fortitude."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810160226/?tag=2022091-20
1915
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HYGGD2/?tag=2022091-20
George Douglas was born on December 8, 1868 in Thüringen, Austria-Hungary. He was the son of John Sholto, a manager of cotton mills, and Vanda (von Poelnitz) Douglass.
When Douglas was six years old, his father was killed in an accident; after his mother remarried, the family moved to the British Isles. This change of culture did not sit well with young Douglas; rebelling against the English public school system, he was sent back to Germany for Karlsruhe Gymnasium from 1883 till 1889, where he entertained a passion for natural history as well as pursuing a traditional curriculum in the classics and the arts. After leaving schoolб twenty-year-old Douglas toured Italy.
Douglas was admitted into the Foreign Office in 1893 and served for a while in St. Petersburg but he presently gave up that profession and went to live in Naples and travel in the Far East. Finally he settled down to write in Capri.
In 1940 Douglas was caught in France by the German invasion but he managed to escape to Portugal and London and after the close of World War II he returned to Capri.
George had written on scientific subjects earlier, Douglas tried his hand at fiction after 1901 and became an assistant editor of the English Review from 1912 to 1915. His best-known book, South Wind (1917), is a fantasy about life on Nepenthe, a Mediterranean island undoubtedly patterned after Capri; and in Old Calabria (1928) he treated of Southern Italy in the form of an imaginative travelogue. In 1930 Douglas wrote Goodbye to Western Culture as a reply to Katherine Mayo's Mother India, and this was followed in 1933 by his memoirs Looking Back.
(Norman Douglas’s first travel book, Siren Land is an homa...)
1911(First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive ...)
1915Douglas was married in 1898 to his cousin Elizabeth, known as Elsa. They divorced in 1904. The couple would have two sons.
