Bibliographies

Turn of the Century Nature Essays

Lene Gary <lenegary@adelphia.net>
January 11, 2006

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for the outpouring of support and resources. Many of them are new to me, which is quite exciting. I was looking for turn of the century (ideally essays that were written in magazine form and eventually compiled into book form, such as Mary Austin's, The Land of Little Rain. Listservs can be overwhelming with the number of daily posts that come through, so I hope you'll understand why I didn't respond to individual suggestions on the listserv. Below is a summary of what I received here. I will continue to update it and share it with you all if I receive more suggestions. Thank you, again, for your help and time. I'm really looking forward to this semester.

Best wishes,
Lene Gary
Montpelier, VT

Nature Essay Resources

Ann Suggested:
Barbara Kingsolver

Maggie Dwyer Submitted:
David Quammen's essays in Outside were pulled into book form.
John McPhee's The New Yorker essays likewise, many times over.
Terry Tempest Williams has a similar history, I believe, though I didn't read her essays in their first forms. I'd leave it to you to compare the material they cover and the amount of science included when compared with Austin, but they are all gifted essayists and creative writers.

Tom Lynch Wrote:
The first place I'd suggest you look it Tom Lyon's THIS INCOMPARABLE LANDE. It is an extensive annotated bibliography of nature writing, with introductory essays.

Rick Van Noy Suggested:
Parts of John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons appeared in Scribner's (1874, with Thomas Moran wood engravings of sublimity). Some of his more scientific and ethnographic stuff appeared in Century (circa 1890). I forget which but one essay appears after a John Muir piece.
The first chapter of Clarence King's Mountainering in the Sierra Nevada appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (1871, with William Dean Howells as editor). So did Thoreau's "Chesuncook," later part of The Maine Woods. Check out John Tallmadge's overview of these 19th century explorers in American Nature Writers.

Pavel Wrote:
A group of New England (specifically NH) writers whose nature essays were similarly serialized - and later compiled - includes Frank Bolles, Bradford Torrey, Annie T Slosson, and Julius H Ward.

Carson Bennett/University of New Mexico Suggested:
I would suggest Greg Martin's "Mountain City" for a great example of local color writing (it's about living in small town Utah in a community of mainly Basque descendants) although it is not particularly a book of nature essays.

Also, look at "The Meadow" by James Galvin. This book seems to me to be exactly what you are looking for. The book is made of short vignettes about life in/around a meadow in Northern Colorado/Southern Wyoming. Fantastic book.

Kent Ryden Said:
And the "Country of the Pointed Firs" stories also appeared in the Atlantic, as did Austin's sketches. It might be worth thinking about the nature essay as a form of local color writing--imaginative travel to a geographically and/or culturally marginal place, far from where the average Atlantic reader lived, that satisfied any antimodern impulses that that reader might have had.

Susan Barnett Wrote:
I commend your attention to our local nature study geniuses, Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock (author of the Handbook of Nature Study, still in print and our all-time best-selling book). Their essays appeared in magazines and in a series of leaflets distributed by Cornell University and the State of New York.

Roxana Robinson Suggested:
Sarah Orne Jewett is, of course, a well-known example of the "local color" genre. Her pieces, appearing collectively in "The Land of Pointed Firs," offer a good deal of close observation of the natural landscape. Also Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Poganuc People" is, as I remember, a series of local color pieces.