OUTDOORS & ADVENTURE
Hunting & Fishing
9 books
Nine books in the tradition of outdoor writing — hunting, fishing, and the specific quality of attention that the pursuit of game or fish demands from the people who do it seriously. The list covers the classic American tradition of hunting and fishing literature, the conservation ethic that developed alongside it, the memoir of specific pursuits in specific places, and the philosophical writing that uses the experience of killing or catching as a way of thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural world. The best hunting and fishing writing is not really about the kill or the catch — it's about what happens to a person's attention when they spend enough time in the outdoors trying to do something difficult and consequential.
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The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
Already on the Manly Tears list and it belongs here as fully as anywhere. An old Cuban fisherman goes out alone and hooks the greatest fish of his life — a massive marlin that pulls his small skiff far out into the Gulf Stream for three days. Hemingway wrote it as his answer to the critics who said he was finished, and the sea in this novel — vast, indifferent, beautiful, and entirely without mercy — is the most fully realized body of water in American fiction. At under one hundred and thirty pages it is best read in a single sitting without interruption.
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Blood Ties
Ted Kerasote
Kerasote follows a single elk hunt in Wyoming while assembling the full moral argument about what it means to kill animals for food — the specific comparison between hunting and factory farming, the responsibility of the predator who takes a life directly versus the consumer who outsources the killing, and the land ethic that connects both. Published in 1993 and the most intellectually serious book on this list. Note the political argument throughout: this is a book making a case about food systems, hunting rights, and American land use that the AoM reader will find more persuasive than most environmental writing precisely because it takes the hunter's position seriously rather than prosecuting it. The uncomfortable entry — not because it lectures, but because it refuses to let anyone off the hook.
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A Hunter's Road
Jim Fergus
Fergus spent the autumn of 1990 driving a camper across America with his English setter Sweetzer, hunting upland birds — pheasant in South Dakota, quail in Texas, woodcock in Michigan, grouse in Montana — and writing about the people, the dogs, the land, and the specific pleasure of organizing a season around following a bird dog through cover. Around 320 pages and the humor and travel entry on this list: warm, funny, and the best account of American upland hunting culture available in book form. Waterfowl hunters looking for the same sensibility in a duck blind will find it in Nash Buckingham's collected stories, the closest equivalent in that tradition. The AoM reader who has never hunted upland birds will finish this book wanting a dog and a shotgun. The reader who already has both will recognize everything in it.
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African Game Trails
Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909, immediately organized a year-long safari to East Africa with his son Kermit, and shot approximately 512 animals including seventeen lions, eleven elephants, and twenty rhinoceroses — specimens collected for the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. He wrote the full account himself at 500 pages with the specific enthusiasm of a man who was constitutionally incapable of doing anything at less than full intensity. The primary source and deep cut entry simultaneously: most readers know Roosevelt killed things but have never read him describing the approach to a wounded buffalo in tall grass or the specific etiquette of the professional hunter relationship. Cross-seeds with the American History and Biography lists. The productive tension throughout: Roosevelt was simultaneously the most aggressive big game hunter of his era and the man who created the American national park system.
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Meditations on Hunting
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher best known for The Revolt of the Masses and had no obvious business writing about hunting — which is precisely why this 1942 essay is the unexpected angle entry on this list. His argument: hunting is not a sport or a pastime but the most ancient and authentic relationship between man and the natural world, the activity through which our species developed everything that makes us human, and the one pursuit in which a man temporarily becomes something closer to what he actually is beneath the social machinery. Under 132 pages and largely unknown outside philosophy and hunting circles. The AoM reader who has hunted his whole life without articulating why will find Ortega y Gasset has done it for him. Cross-seeds with the Philosophy list.
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The Nick Adams Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway built his literary voice in these stories — Nick Adams hunting and fishing in the Michigan woods and streams of his boyhood, learning what the natural world requires of a man who pays attention to it. The two-part story Big Two-Hearted River, in which Nick fishes a trout stream alone after the war with a deliberateness that is barely keeping something darker at bay, is the finest piece of outdoor writing in American literature and the reason this collection belongs on this list rather than the Fiction list. Primary source in the most direct sense: Hemingway describing what hunting and fishing meant before he became Hemingway. The Nick Adams stories are where the masculine outdoor tradition in American letters begins. Around 268 pages.
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The Complete Angler
Izaak Walton
Walton wrote this in 1653 as a dialogue between a fisherman, a hunter, and a falconer walking through the English countryside — the fisherman making the case that angling is the most contemplative and virtuous of the outdoor pursuits, and the book that has been in continuous print for nearly four hundred years proving him approximately right. Under 250 pages and the canonical entry on this list: the oldest serious fishing book in the English language, still genuinely readable, and the origin of the argument that fishing is less about catching fish than about the quality of attention it requires. The reader who thinks of fishing as a pastime rather than a practice will finish this book with a revised opinion. Every fishing writer since 1653 has been writing in Walton's shadow whether they knew it or not.
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A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean
The shadow that falls across the whole novella is the question of what a father can do for a son he cannot reach — and Maclean's answer, arrived at after a lifetime of thinking about it, is one of the most honest and most heartbreaking things ever written about the limits of fatherhood. A Presbyterian minister who taught his sons to fly fish and write clear sentences and not much else, on the theory that these two things contained everything a man needed to know about grace and the nature of the world.
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Death in the Long Grass
Peter Hathaway Capstick
In this, his first book, Capstick shows us why he became a legend in the world of big game hunting. Capstick makes a field of ten foot high grass (and the angry fauna that no doubt reside there) the most terrifying thing on planet earth, but also the most exciting.“If 12,000 pounds of screaming, screeching, infuriated elephant bearing down on you has somehow rattled your nerves to the point that you miss the six-by-four inch spot on his forehead…then you may as well forget it. The most talented mortuary cosmetician in the world couldn’t rewire you so your own mother would know if you were face up or down.”