About the Author and the Text

William O. Douglas

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) was a distinguished American who served for many years as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, one of the longest-serving judges in that court's history. Beyond his legal career he was known as a passionate lover of the outdoors -- a keen hiker, mountaineer and conservationist who found renewal in nature. His writings often draw on his personal experiences in the wild and on the lessons he learned from testing himself against physical challenge. This blend of a reflective, disciplined mind and a love of outdoor adventure shapes the piece studied here.

The Text

'Deep Water' is an autobiographical excerpt taken from Douglas's book 'Of Men and Mountains', and it is studied as a prose lesson in the CBSE Class 12 English Core (NCERT Flamingo) syllabus. It is a true, first-person account drawn from the author's own life, not a work of fiction. In it, Douglas looks back on a fear that troubled him for years and describes, honestly and in detail, both how the fear took hold of him and how he eventually overcame it.

The subject of the piece is the author's deep-seated terror of water. Douglas explains that this fear was not something he was born with but something that grew out of two frightening experiences in his boyhood. The first was a moment at a beach in California when a powerful wave knocked him down and swept over him, leaving him shaken. The second and far more serious experience took place at the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool in Yakima, where he came terrifyingly close to drowning. Together these events planted in him a fear of water so strong that it stayed with him into adulthood and spoiled his enjoyment of activities like swimming, fishing, boating and canoeing.

The second half of the account describes the author's determined effort to conquer this fear. Refusing to let it rule his life, he set about defeating it through patient training and sheer force of will. He engaged a swimming instructor and, step by step, learned the skills of swimming. Even after he had technically learned to swim, however, traces of the old terror remained, and he made himself return to the water again and again until he was certain the fear was truly gone.

Understanding that the author was a thoughtful, disciplined man with a deep love of nature, that the text is a genuine personal memoir from 'Of Men and Mountains', and that its theme is the conquest of fear through willpower and training prepares a reader to follow both the emotional and the practical stages of his ordeal.