ALL THE COLORS OF A RAINBOW THE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO TROUT IS THE WORK OF A YALE UNDERGRADUATE

It is unusual for an undergraduate to appear on the cover of the
Yale Alumni Magazine, but that is the case with the April 1996
issue. The undergraduate is a 20-year-old junior named James
Prosek, and he is being hailed, with a touch of hyperbole, as
"the Audubon of the fishing world." Prosek is the author/artist
of an entrancing book, Trout: An Illustrated History (Alfred A.
Knopf, 160 pages, $27.50). The book is a remarkable achievement,
not only because of the author's youth but also because more
than 70 watercolors make it the first book to portray all the
species and subspecies of trout, as well as some extinct ones,
found in North America.

How did such a young person come to produce so unusual a book?
Two influences were at work on Prosek from an early age: bird
paintings and fishing. When he was five, James was captivated by
the paintings of artists John James Audubon and Louis Agassiz
Fuertes, and he began sketching birds. "My fascination with the
idea of capturing a living, ecstatically colorful creature
within the pages of a book," Prosek writes, "was born out of my
love for both Audubon and Fuertes."

At age nine Prosek started sneaking into closed reservoirs to
fish for bass, and when he was 10 he was almost caught by a
local game warden named Joseph Haines. Four years later Haines
did catch him, but he made James his protege and took him trout
fishing. "My own son had moved to Colorado, I had extra time,
and I figured I could spend it with James," Haines explains. "I
showed him how to fish legally, and it really brought the light
to James."

The inspiration for the book came after his father, Louis
Prosek, a retired astronomy teacher and an avid birder, showed
his 13-year-old son a magazine article about the rare blueback
trout, a subspecies of char purportedly found only in eight
lakes and ponds in Maine. Unable to find any book on trout
similar to Audubon's work on birds, James started on his own
book a short time later. He kept an angling diary, and whenever
he could get away from Joel Barlow High School, in Redding,
Conn., (where he was the valedictorian of his graduating class
in 1993) and, later, from Yale, he traveled thousands of miles
in search of trout. He went to Colorado, where he backpacked
into the high country with Haines's son, Joey, and to Alaska.
Instead of keeping most of the fish he caught, Prosek
photographed them in color and quickly released them because the
brightness and color of kept trout soon fade.

One of Prosek's most cherished memories is of catching a
blueback trout in Maine after three days of trying; the fish
struck a black ghost streamer about 35 feet deep on a sinking
fly line. Haines recalls, "James couldn't wait to show me the
color photograph. He said, 'Mr. Haines, here's what a blueback
looks like!' He's a special individual."

Two subspecies of trout--the silver, which was known only in a
pond in Dublin, N.H., and the yellowfin cutthroat, known only in
Colorado--have long been extinct, and Prosek based his
watercolor portraits on detailed descriptions by ichthyologists
who lived before color photography.

An English major with "an unofficial minor" in architecture,
Prosek is doing a paper on monosyllabic sentences in Shakespeare
for Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom, the
influential author and editor of more than 565 books, including
the paean to dead white European males, The Western Canon: The
Books and School of the Ages. But now that Trout: An Illustrated
History has itself been acclaimed as a standard reference,
Prosek is off to conquer new fields. Thanks to a $1,500 travel
grant from Yale, he will spend the summer in England doing
research for his senior essay on--who else?--Izaak Walton.

THREE COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS: ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES PROSEK Prosek caught a rare blueback (below) in Maine but drew the extinct silver (top) and yellowfin cutthroat from old descriptions. [Series of paintings of trout]