Tom Horton – författare

A classic of Chesapeake Bay literature, Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time chronicles the three years Horton and his family spent on Smith Island, a marshy archipelago in the middle of Maryland's famous estuary. The result is an intimate portrait of a deeply traditional community that lived much as their ancestors did three hundred years before, attuned to the habits of blue crab, oyster, and waterfowl. In a new afterword for this edition, Horton brings the story of Smith Island, and its people, up to the present.

Originally published in hardback, this book about the Chesapeake is now available in paperback from Johns Hopkins. The author, Tom Horton, is a native of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and has written about the environment for the past 15 years in the "Baltimore Sun". His stories of oysters and sea nettle, elms and rivers, barrier islands and blue crabs, farmers and watermen, always reach beyond the local to the most universal of subjects.

Those who know and love the Chesapeake will find the bay they treasure on the pages of Water's Way: Life along the Chesapeake. The story of one of North America's most fascinating regions unfolds through the sensitive photographs and prose of two men who have studied the Chesapeake all their lives. Photographer David W. Harp and writer Tom Horton vividly portray how, as Horton writes, "the edges where land and water meet charm us all, from watermen to watercolorists and beachcombers to duck hunters." Water's Way will guide you to "those rare, hidden nooks of the bay country where nature still appears as glorious and untrammeled as it did a thousand years ago." It will also take you to less hidden, but equally intriguing sites within the Chesapeake's reach as Harp and Horton depict the worlds of both nature and humans. An intimate knowledge of and an unwavering reverence for the bay pervade Water's Way. Harp and Horton are as attuned to the romance that still clings to the Chesapeake as they are to the realities that inspire and threaten it. In a time when the region faces tremendous changes and challenges, Water's Way is neither strident nor sentimental.Rather, it is suffused with the fundamental respect for the bay which Harp and Horton see as key to its survival.

Once again marrying photography with prose, longtime collaborators David W. Harp and Tom Horton capture the natural beauty and rich history of the Nanticoke River, one of the Chesapeake's least known waterways. Despite rampant development and agricultural abuse, the Nanticoke remains one of the most pristine rivers of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, looking much as it did when Captain John Smith first sailed its waters four hundred years ago. While parts of the river drain stormwater off the flat fields of the Delmarva Peninsula, most of the Nanticoke serves no purpose except natural beauty. Its meandering waters and fertile wetlands sustain a remarkable diversity of life. The Nanticoke is home to beavers, otters, woodpeckers, freshwater fish and shellfish, watergrasses, bog orchids, bald cypresses, and the rare Atlantic white cedar. More than one hundred color photographs reveal unspoiled waters rarely glimpsed other than by Native Americans, tugboat captains, naturalists, and commercial waterman. The Nanticoke makes clear the urgency of preserving this vital but fragile ecosystem.