Osa Johnson - I Married Adventure: The Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson

A pleasant, forthrightexciting book.

Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker

It makes good readingat this dark hour, as good an escape story as you are apt to run into for some time.

Atlantic Monthly

I Married Adventure is a fine book on many counts. A good travel book, a good adventure book, a good book about animals, a good book on photography, and, best of alla good human story about two extremely likable people, told by one of them with simplicity, humor, [and] warmth.

Rose Feld, Books

It isnt just the animal-lover who will cherish this story. Anyone who likes a thrilling tale (a true one, too) with a plucky, nervy, cheerful, and charming hero and heroine is all set. I Married Adventure is as rare and real as the people who made it possible.

Olga Owens, Boston Transcript

The reader is impressed with the tremendous industriousness of these two people, their physical endurance, their patience, their understanding of animals and natives, and their love for each other. [The] old and young will enjoy this book. It is splendidly illustrated.

M. N. Baker, Library Journal

Every page of her book is readable and exciting: the photographs are plentiful and have all the dramatic quality that we are used to in the camera work of the author and her husband.

Manchester Guardian

The Martin Johnsonswere simple people who loved adventure,animals, and who, thanks to a quiet singleness of purpose, must have lived a very happy life until Martin was killed in the crash of an American airliner. Their storyis almost as interesting for the picture it gives of two happy people as it is for the account of adventures in Borneo, Africa, and the South Seas. I Married Adventure tells the whole story unaffectedly and with a simple charm that is highly engaging. It belongs in any list of Americana, for the Johnsons were as American as Davy Crockett.

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Nation

I Married Adventure will delight the rocking-chair travelers and explorers and revive the urge in those who have wandered along the byways.

Linton Wells, Saturday Review of Literature

Books by Martin Johnson

Books by Osa Johnson

In the course of their twenty years of traveling together, from 1917 to 1937, Martin and Osa Johnson exploredby boat, foot, car, and planeislands of the Pacific, rivers of Borneo, and savannahs and forests of Africa. They made ten popular documentary films along with more than seventy lecture films. Between them they published 120 articles in publications ranging from Natural History (the journal of the American Museum of Natural History) and Forest and Stream to the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. They inspired a comic strip and a kids club. Osa created a line of clothing featuring safari-inspired colors, and a line of stuffed animals to accompany her charming childrens picture books. Advertisers posted Martin and Osas faces in magazine ads hoping to boost sales of everything from beer to batteries.

But behind their popular faces, lay the souls of true adventurers. As Osa explains in her autobiographical I Married Adventure, both she and Martin were from restless, adventurous lineages. Martin scored his first explorer gig on board Jack Londons Snark sailing to the South Seas. When back in Kansas (both were natives of the Sunflower State) lecturing with photographs from the trip, he and Osa met when she filled in as singer for his talk. Though she claims not to have been impressed by his work, the two were quickly married in a whirlwind affair. Not long afterwards, they embarked on their first married adventure to the South Seas, after which the couple were inseparable for two decades of adventure.

Unlike the dry, matter-of-fact work of many adventurers, the Johnsons work revealed their personalities. In their films, books, and public personas, they were real people. They were young and energetic. They mixed humor and humility with science and pop culture. President of the American Museum of Natural History F. Trubee Davidson, who knew the Johnsons well, wrote in the Forward to