Prester John - John Buchan

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Résumé :
Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It tells the story of a young Scotsman named David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a Zulu uprising under the charismatic black minister John Laputa is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John. This was Buchan's sixth published novel, but the first to reach a wide readership, establishing him as a writer of fast-paced adventures in exotic locales. He drew the background from his two-year stint in South Africa (1901-1903) as political private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, in what came to be known as Milner's Young Men or Milner's Kindergarten. It was in South Africa he gained a feeling for the man of action and the sense of adventure, as well as practical, political training. A silent film Prester John, based on the novel, released in 1920, was shot and produced in South Africa by African Film Productions. (wikipedia.org)

Biographie:
John Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.

Sommaire:
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940....