With Chatwin

Susannah Clapp was Chatwin's first editor, and she describes in detail her work with him on In Patagonia, a book that changed the idea of what travel writing could be. Her account skillfully describes his life from a series of oblique angles. We move from his childhood through the years at Sotheby's in London - years rich in the machinations of the art market - to his studying archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and the beginnings of his writing at the London Sunday Times Magazine, to his travels and the six strikingly different books that he wrote before he died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of forty-eight. She gives us unique insight into how Chatwin thought and wrote and where he did it, whether in forts or towers, in Wales or Rajasthan, always with a Mont Blanc pen on American yellow legal pads, taking the material from his eighty-five moleskin notebooks (now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford), bought in a shop on the Left Bank in Paris. Clapp subtly brings to life the writer behind the work.