Reading Nature: The Evolution of American Nature Writing

Reading Nature highlights the ten books that most influenced the scope and direction of literary natural history in the United States. It explores how American nature writing came to focus on the deep observation of wild landscapes and how the genre evolved over 163 years, beginning with the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in 1854. The volume also examines Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain (1903), John Burroughs’s Ways of Nature (1905), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), Rachel Carson’s The Sea around Us (1951), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991), Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), and J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place (2016). This book features a series of close readings exploring how these authors transformed popular understanding of the natural world.

John Seibert Farnsworth is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies and Sciences, Emeritus, at Santa Clara University, where his teaching and research focused on environmental writing and literature. He is currently serving a three-year term on Washington State’s Wildlife Diversity Advisory Council, where he cochairs a subcommittee on the WDFW State Wildlife Action Plan. He is the author of Nature Beyond Solitude: Notes from the Field, and Coves of Departure: Notes from the Sea of Cortes.