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John Muir: Nature Writings

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth | My First Summer in the Sierra | The Mountains of California | Stickeen | essays More

Edited by William Cronon

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week John Muir, “A Wind-Storm in the Forest”
April 21, 2023

Story of the Week John Muir, “Yosemite Valley in Flood”
November 12, 2021

Story of the Week John Muir, “Save the Redwoods”
August 25, 2016

In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America’s most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a far-seeing prophet of environmental awareness who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, he was also a master of natural description who evoked with unique power and intimacy the untrammeled landscapes of the American West. The Library of America’s Nature Writings collects his most significant and best-loved works in a single volume.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) is Muir’s memoir of growing up by the sea in Scotland, of coming to America with his family at age eleven, and of his early fascination with the natural world. My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) is his famous account of the spiritual awakening he experienced when, in 1869, he first encountered the mountains and valleys of central California, of which he wrote: “Bathed in such beauty, watching the expressions ever varying on the faces of the mountains, watching the stars, which here have a glory that the lowlander never dreams of, watching the circling seasons, listening to the songs of the waters and winds and birds, would be endless pleasure…. No other place has ever so overwhelmingly attracted me as this hospitable, Godful wilderness.”

The natural history classic The Mountains of California (1894) draws on half a lifetime of exploration of the High Sierra country to celebrate and evoke the region’s lakes, forests, flowers, and animals, its glaciers, storms, floods, and geological formations, in a masterpiece of observation and poetic description: “After ten years spent in the heart of it … it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.”

Stickeen (1909), Muir’s most popular book, is the affectionate story of his adventure with a dog in Alaska. Rounding out the volume is a rich selection of essays—including “Yosemite Glaciers,” “God’s First Temples,” “Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta,” “The American Forests,” and the late appeal “Save the Redwoods”—highlighting various aspects of his career: his exploration of the Grand Canyon and of what became Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, his successful crusades to preserve the wilderness, his early walking tour to Florida, and the Alaska journey of 1879.

William Cronon, volume editor, is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, and the editor of Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

John Muir: Nature Writings is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from the Margaret T. Morris Foundation, in honor of Margaret T. Morris.
News & Views

Story of the Week John Muir, “A Wind-Storm in the Forest”
April 21, 2023

Story of the Week John Muir, “Yosemite Valley in Flood”
November 12, 2021

Story of the Week John Muir, “Save the Redwoods”
August 25, 2016

Interviews Editor Bill McKibben on American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
April 22, 2016
Table of Contents

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

My First Summer in the Sierra

The Mountains of California

Stickeen

Selected Essays
Yosemite Glaciers
Yosemite Valley in Flood
A Geologist’s Winter Walk
Wild Wool
Flood-Storm in the Sierra
Living Glaciers of California
God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?
Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta
Alaska
Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park
The American Forests
The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West
The Yellowstone National Park
The Forests of the Yosemite Park
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado
Hetch Hetchy Valley
Cedar Keys
Save the Redwoods

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ISBN: 978-1-88301124-6 888 pages

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N° 92 Library of America Series

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