Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951) is a book by French climber Maurice Herzog

Maurice Herzog

Maurice Herzog is a French mountaineer and sports administrator who was born in Lyon, France. He led the expedition that first climbed a peak over 8000m, Annapurna, in 1950, and reached the summit with Louis Lachenal. Upon his return, he wrote a best-selling book about the expedition...

, leader of the first expedition in history to summit and return from a 8000+ meter mountain, Annapurna

Annapurna

Annapurna is a section of the Himalayas in north-central Nepal that includes Annapurna I, thirteen additional peaks over and 16 more over ....

 in the Himalayas

Himalayas

The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...

. 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 Lionel Terray

Lionel Terray

Lionel Terray was a French climber who made many first ascents, including Makalu in the Himalaya and Cerro Fitzroy in the Patagonian Andes ....

, Louis Lachenal

Louis Lachenal

Louis Lachenal , a French climber born in Annecy, Haute-Savoie, was one of the first two mountaineers to climb a summit of more than 8,000 meters. On 3 June 1950, along with Maurice Herzog, he reached the summit of Annapurna I in Nepal at a height of 8,091 m...

, and Gaston Rébuffat

Gaston Rébuffat

Gaston Rébuffat was a well-known French alpinist and mountain guide. The climbing technique, to gaston, was named after him. He was a recipient of France's prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1984....

 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, like George Mallory

George Mallory

George Herbert Leigh Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s....

 in the 1920s, with the publication of Annapurna, Herzog became the first living mountaineering celebrity known to the general public. Annapurna inspired other climbers and set the bar higher and peoples hopes for the last great conquest of mountaineering: Mount Everest

Mount Everest

Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at above sea level. It is located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas. The international boundary runs across the precise summit point...

. With that in mind the book ends with the stirring line “there are other Annapurnas in the lives of men”.

Reception

The book has sold over 11 million copies, as of 2000, more than any other mountaineering title. Maurice Isserman in Fallen Giants (Yale University Press, 2010), a history of Himalayan climbing, consider Annapurna to be the "most successful [mountaineering] expedition book of all times". In the United States it was published as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection which increased its circulation and popularity. National Geographic in its list of all-time 100 greatest adventure and exploration books ranked Annapurna #6 out of 100, saying the book "conveys the essential spirit of climbing as no popular book had before and earns its place here as the most influential mountaineering book of all time."

Annapurna served as an inspiration for the parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 The Ascent of Rum Doodle

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a short 1956 novel by W. E. Bowman . It is a parody of the non-fictional chronicles of mountaineering expeditions The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a short 1956 novel by W. E. Bowman (1911–1985). It is a parody of the non-fictional chronicles of mountaineering expeditions...

(1956) which pokes gentle but pointed fun at Herzog's sometimes pompous writing style.

Controversy over Herzog's account of the ascent

Herzog's account of the summit day has been called into question with the publication of other members’ accounts of the expedition, most significantly by a biography of Gaston Rébuffat

Gaston Rébuffat

Gaston Rébuffat was a well-known French alpinist and mountain guide. The climbing technique, to gaston, was named after him. He was a recipient of France's prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1984....

and the posthumous publication, in 1996, of Lachenal’s contemporaneous journals. The 2000 book True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna by David Roberts examines the controversy.