Description: Bruce Chatwin burst onto the literary landscape in 1977 with In Patagonia, which quickly established him as one of the most influential travel writers of the twentieth century. The books that followed -- The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz -- confirmed his enormous talent. As legendary for his intelligence and his conversation as for his wanderlust and his writing, Chatwin was welcome in any society -- from the glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remotest communities in Africa, South America, Australia, and Asia. He was a thinker of striking originality; and a reader of astonishing breadth and depth. Salman Rushdie claimed that "he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across".

Yet when Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989, he died a mystery, a man of many apparently conflicting identities. Married for 23 years to Elizabeth, an American wife he adored, he was also an acknowledged libertine and openly bisexual. Insatiably curious about human nature, Chatwin was also known to be manipulative; a socialite and celebrity, he was at heart a single-minded loner whose wide-ranging explorations demanded extreme solitude.

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