19 Facts About Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton left his residence at Shallowford to the local poor.

Izaak Walton is believed to have been educated in Stafford before moving to London in his teens.

Izaak Walton had a small shop in the upper storey of Thomas Gresham's Royal Burse or Exchange in Cornhill.

Izaak Walton became verger and churchwarden of the church, and a friend of the vicar, John Donne.

Izaak Walton went to live just north of his birthplace, at a spot between the towns of Stafford and Stone, where he had bought some land edged by a small river.

Izaak Walton published the first of his several biographies of clergymen, a life of John Donne, in 1640.

Izaak Walton was entrusted with returning it to London from where it was smuggled out of the country to Charles II who was then in exile.

Izaak Walton's second wife died in 1662, and was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where there is a monument to her memory.

Izaak Walton sometimes visited Charles Cotton in his fishing house on the River Dove.

The Compleat Angler was first published in 1653, but Izaak Walton continued to add to it for a quarter of a century.

Izaak Walton did not profess to be an expert with a fishing fly; the fly fishing in his first edition was contributed by Thomas Barker, a retired cook and humorist, who published a treatise of his own, The Art of Angling in 1651; but in the use of the live worm, the grasshopper and the frog "Piscator" himself could speak as a master.

Izaak Walton made significant contributions to seventeenth-century life-writing throughout his career.

Izaak Walton had already contributed an elegy to the 1633 edition of Donne's poems, and he completed and published the life, much to the satisfaction of the most learned critics, in 1640.

Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Izaak Walton undertook his life ; it was finished in 1642 and published in 1651 as a preface to the volume Reliquiae Wottonianae.

Izaak Walton studied these men's lives in detail, and provides many insights into their character.

The farm was let to tenants, and Izaak Walton kept the excellent fishing.

Advertising mogul and land developer Barron Collier founded the Izaak Walton Fly Fishing Club in 1908 at his Useppa Island resort near Fort Myers, Florida.

The Izaak Walton League is an American association formed in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, to preserve fishing streams.

Izaak Walton has been inducted into the American National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame.