River of Shadows

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Making of the Technological Wild West
AuthorRebecca Solnit
SubjectEdweard Muybridge
GenreNon-fiction
PublishedFebruary 2003Viking
Publication placeUnited States
Pages320
ISBN0142004103
778.5/3/092
Preceded byAs Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art 
Followed byHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities 

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is a 2003 book by American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking; in the United Kingdom it was published by Bloomsbury as Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge. The book is a biographical portrait of photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge, a history of the development of technological change in the West during the later half of the nineteenth century that led to development of the modern film industry in Hollywood and later the information technology industry in Silicon Valley, and an essay focusing on a series of connections between Muybridge's life and the changing human landscape of the American West.

In 2004, Solnit was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, and Harvard's Mark Lynton History Prize for River of Shadows.