Over the summer of 1821, a cash-strapped John James Audubon worked as a tutor at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana’s rural West Feliciana Parish. This move initiated a profound change in direction for the struggling artist. Oakley’s woods teemed with life, galvanizing Audubon to undertake one of the most extraordinary endeavors in the annals of art: a comprehensive pictorial record of America’s birds. That summer, Audubon began what would eventually become his four-volume opus, Birds of America. In A Summer of Birds, Danny Heitman recounts the season that shaped Audubon’s destiny, sorting facts from romance to give an intimate view of the world’s most famous bird artist. A new preface marks the two-­hundredth anniversary of that eventful interlude, reflecting on Audubon’s enduring legacy among artists, aesthetes, and nature lovers in Louisiana and around the world. If all historians wrote as beautifully as Danny Heitman, history would be everyone’s favorite subject. . . . Filled with all the color, texture, and detail of an Audubon painting. -- Louisiana History A fine portrait of the artist as a man in motion, a young man rather than an icon. -- Living Bird Magazine With a New Preface by the Author Danny Heitman is an award-winning columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana and editor of Phi Kappa Phi's Forum magazine. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere.