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Lawrence Millman

American travel writer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ6504387 ↗
Source-derived summary

Lawrence Millman (born January 13, 1946, in Kansas City, Missouri) is an adventure travel writer and mycologist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He has won numerous awards, including a Northern Lights Award, a Lowell Thomas Award, an award for the best article on Canada in a U.K. publication (1996), and a Pacific- Asia Gold Travel Award; he has been anthologized in the Best American Travel Writing (Houghton Mifflin) three years in a row. He is fellow of the prestigious Explorers Club, who subsequently resigned from the club,

Early life and education

Millman developed an early interest in the natural world during childhood, engaging in outdoor exploration and observation. A formative experience occurred during a visit to Walden Pond, associated with the work of Henry David Thoreau, which contributed to his interest in natural history. He later pursued academic studies in literature and earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Career

Millman began his professional career as a professor of English, but later shifted away from academia to pursue independent research and writing. He undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Ireland, where he documented oral storytelling traditions in his first ethnographic book, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, which examines the decline of oral culture in the context of modern media.

His subsequent research took him to Arctic regions, where he developed an interest in ethnomycology the relationship between human cultures and fungi. His work has documented Indigenous knowledge systems, including the medicinal and cultural uses of fungi.

Works

Scholarly works

He is the author of eighteen books, including Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems, Fungipedia, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Northern Latitudes, Last Places, An Evening Among Headhunters, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Lost in the Arctic, and Fascinating Fungi of New England.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Lawrence Millman” as american travel writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lawrence, Millman and American.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946, 1996—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—1948-01-13, 1946-01-01—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Lawrence, Millman and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Lawrence Millman”, the useful work is to connect “american travel writer” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6504387. VIAF identifies the subject as 79357473. The Library of Congress control number is n81097583. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1996.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lawrence Millman”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lawrence Millman primary sources, Lawrence Millman archive and Lawrence research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Lawrence Millman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.