Daniel Boone From Classic Series

Daniel Boone

Edna McGuire, Jack Merryweather 
Wheeler Publishing Co., 1945

Presented here is a more typical Daniel Boone biography originating from the American Adventure Series by Wheeler Publishing. The series presented classic subjects ranging from our nation's beginnings through manifest destiny but curiously topped with a few anomalies e.g. anomalous airplane pilot bio's attesting, I suppose, to the eminence of WW2 heroes and the myth-making handiwork cobbled them into our national pantheon. This volume and the companion Davey Crockett constitute, at present, my small collection. Regrettably, there might have been more but for some reason I passed on several others in that dusty Brooklyn book nook that day. A subsequent trip there digging deep into the stacks did not turn them up. Alas, one of those tough lessons.


The illustrations in this biography are typical of myriad books on Daniel Boone. A sturdy and chiseled romantic iconography peoples the book in full page illustrations and spot vignettes. Work like this takes it's cue from preceding pictures and cements their primacy by duplication.


I'm not 100% sure of the target age of this series but young readers from 12-16 seems a reasonable guess. However, these American Adventure books are consistent with a general post-war phenomenon of book series, not necessarily children's, that are explored in depth in Series Americana by Carol Fitzgerald. As exhaustively researched as her previous work on The American Rivers Series and like those titles this voluminous array also was given exhibition form by the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book at the Broward County Public Library in Florida. The contents of that exhibition and survey may be viewed here:
Series Americana exhibition 

Enpapers