Annapurna (book)

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951) is a book by French climber Maurice Herzog, leader of the 1950 French Annapurna expedition, the first expedition in history to summit and return from an 8000+ meter mountain, Annapurna in the Himalayas. It is considered a classic of mountaineering literature and perhaps the most influential climbing book ever written.

Overview

The original text was written in French, first published in 1951, and has been translated to a number of languages. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith translated the book from French into English in 1952.

The expedition was the first to attain the summit of one of the eight-thousanders—peaks higher than 8,000 meters, all located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia. Members of the expedition included Louis Lachenal, Gaston Rébuffat, and Lionel Terray, then regarded as some of the finest mountaineers in the world, now regarded as among the finest ever.

Although there had been earlier internationally famous Himalayan mountaineers, such as George Mallory in the 1920s, with the publication of Annapurna, Herzog became the first living mountaineering celebrity known to the general public.

The book, with its famous exhortation that "there are other Annapurnas in the lives of men" inspired a generation of climbers.

Reception

The book has sold over 11 million copies, as of 2000, more than any other mountaineering title. Maurice Isserman in Fallen Giants (2010), a history of Himalayan climbing, consider Annapurna to be the "most successful [mountaineering] expedition book of all times".