Synopsis
The early twentieth-century works of Mary Austin and John Muir are nature-writing classics. Midwesterners by birth, Austin and Muir both adopted the American West as their home and wrote about its grand and wild landscapes in ways that came to define the genre of western nature writing.
Here, for the first time in a single volume, are excerpts from both writers' work: Austin's Earth Horizon and The Land of Journeys' Ending and Muir's The Grand Canon of the Colorado and Travels in Alaska. An introduction by Ann Zwinger provides literary analysis and biographical context and explores the two writers' influence on a tradition of western nature writing that continues today.
Reviews
In the early 20th century, Austin, who was captivated by the desert, and Muir, who was devoted to mountains and forests, forged new territory in nature writing. Excerpts from Austin's Earth Horizons and The Land of Journey's Ending are paired in this collection with those from Muir's The Grand Canon of the Colorado and Travels in Alaska. Zwinger ( Beyond the Aspen Grove ) has selected striking examples of the work of these two writers; of particular note are the essays on the the Grand Canyon. This volume and its companion, the publisher's 1991 Nature/Walking by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, edited by John Elder, vividly illustrate the differences in perspective between early eastern observers and later western writers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This Western companion volume to Emerson and Thoreau's Nature & Walking (Beacon, 1991) contains excerpts from works by Austin and Muir, whose response to the characteristic Western terrain is very different from the way the East Coast writers regarded their more settled landscapes. Austin, a prolific novelist, poet, and essayist, reveals her poetic nature even in her nonfictional accounts of the American Southwest. To her, all nature is animate, almost human. Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, is also a memorable writer on such natural subjects as the Grand Canyon and Alaska. The appeal of these writers' style, the specificity and knowledge with which they portray the Western landscape, and care with which editor Zwinger, herself a nature writer and illustrator, has introduced and edited the selections make this work a necessary additon to American readers' knowledge of the western United States.
Marie L. Lally, Alabama Sch. of Mathematics and Science, Mobile
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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