ABSTRACT
If the tables were turned and someone were looking for a representative figure to embody the physiognomic and cultural essence of “National Geographic land” in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, Maynard Owen Williams would be a prime candidate. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, big and athletic, well-educated and bespectacled, friendly and affable, Williams wrote and/or contributed photographs to over 90 articles for the magazine – enough to fill five specially bound volumes. His writing tended toward the corny and his photographs aimed for the picturesque. “‘Mr. Geographic” to a generation of its readers,”1 Williams worked for the Geographic from 1919 until his retirement in 1960, spending 30 years as the magazine’s chief of foreign staff. His work for the National Geographic Magazine included such highprofile stories as the revelation of the contents of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1923, an arctic expedition with Donald MacMillan in 1925, and the 1931-32 CitroënHaardt Trans-Asia Expedition, a grandiose attempt at a motorcar journey through mountainous central Asia. Williams was an immensely prolific private writer as well, sometimes writing as many as five or six letters a day.
