OUTDOORS & ADVENTURE
Wilderness & Nature Writing
11 books
Eleven books in the tradition of American nature writing — from Thoreau through Abbey through the contemporary writers who have carried the tradition into the age of climate change. The list covers the foundational texts, the canonical 20th-century examples, and a few recent entries that have earned their place in the tradition by finding something new to say about the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Nature writing is a form that has always been as much about the observer as the observed, and the books on this list are selected in part for the quality and honesty of the observing intelligence at their centers.
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Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
The tragic yet inspirational tale of Christopher McCandless, a young college graduate who abandoned a promising future in exchange for a life on the road. Hitchhiking across North America, McCandless eventually reaches his final destination, Alaska, where he aims to survive on his own in the wilderness. Krakauer follows McCandless's philosophical journey full circle, from rebellious twenty-something who just wants to escape society to man who is fighting for his life and realizes that a life without the company of others is not complete. “Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.”
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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s — before the paved roads and the visitor centers — and wrote this account of the Utah desert as both a place of extraordinary beauty and an argument about what industrial tourism was doing to the American wilderness. Published in 1968 and still the angriest book in the American nature writing tradition: Abbey had no patience for sentimentality about nature or for the national park machinery that was converting wilderness into a drive-through experience. Note the political argument throughout — this book is making a case about land use and the specific cost of comfort. Walden is the ancestor Abbey was consciously writing against; this is what Thoreau's philosophy looks like with the New England gentility removed. Around 269 pages. Cross-seeds with the American West History list.
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The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
In 1973, novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen traveled into the Dolpo highlands of Nepal — one of the most remote and inaccessible places on earth — with wildlife biologist George Schaller to study Himalayan blue sheep and, if fortune allowed, to glimpse the near-mythical snow leopard. He never saw one. The book is not about the leopard. It is about what a man discovers in extreme terrain when he is grieving, alone with his thoughts, and stripped of every comfort that usually allows him to avoid them. The Himalayan landscape is as harrowing as anything on this list — it just does its work quietly, from the inside out.
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard
Dillard spent a year living alone in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, watching — with the attention of a scientist and the prose of a poet — the natural world in all its beauty and violence. The result won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and remains one of the great American books about paying attention: to the world, to the present moment, to the staggering fact of being alive at all. It is the philosophical anchor of this list — the book that makes the case, through close observation of creek water and frog eyes and the death of a moth, that the world is incomprehensibly generous to those who bother to look at it. Gratitude, for Dillard, is not a feeling but a discipline.
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Wind, Sand, and Stars
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a French pilot better known for his work The Little Prince, was equal parts adventurer and literary giant. His poetic musings on the life well lived, combined with his recounting of various calamities he and others faced while flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes mountains, makes this one adventure book no man should be without.“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
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The Mountains of California
John Muir
Muir explored the Sierra Nevada on foot through the 1870s and 1880s — climbing peaks alone in storms, sleeping without shelter in high altitude meadows, and writing about what he found with an evangelical joy that made him the most effective wilderness advocate in American history. This 1894 collection covers the Sierra Nevada in its full scope: the glaciers, the sequoias, the specific quality of light at ten thousand feet, and the water ouzels that winter in mountain streams and that Muir loved above all other creatures. Around 300 pages and the primary source entry on this list — the voice that invented the American idea of wilderness as something worth protecting rather than simply conquering. Desert Solitaire is the angrier descendant; A Sand County Almanac is the more systematic one. Muir is the origin of both.
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The Wild Places
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane spent several years seeking out the genuinely wild places remaining in the British Isles — the Cairngorms in winter, a remote island off the Scottish coast, an ancient forest in Ireland — and wrote about what he found with a literary precision that makes him the best nature writer working in English today. Around 340 pages and the international entry on this list: a corrective to the American assumption that wilderness requires the scale of the Rockies or the Alaska Range. Macfarlane's argument is that wildness is a quality of attention rather than simply a function of acreage, and that the small wild places — the ungrazed valley, the unvisited shore — matter as much as the grand ones. Cross-seeds with the Travel Memoirs list. The reader who finishes this book will look at the landscape differently on his drive home.
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The Outermost House
Henry Beston
In 1926, Beston built a two-room cottage on the outer beach of Cape Cod and spent a full year alone there — watching the seasons, the birds, the storms, and the specific quality of light on the Atlantic — and wrote this account of what a year of sustained attention to one wild place produces in a man. Around 214 pages and largely forgotten outside nature writing circles, which makes it the deep cut entry and one of the most unjust omissions from the American literary canon. Published in 1928 and still the finest account of the New England coast in print. The prose is unhurried and precise in ways that contemporary nature writing rarely achieves. The AoM reader who discovers this book will press it on people for years afterward.
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A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold
Leopold was a wildlife biologist who spent decades managing the American land system and this book — published in 1949, the year he died of a heart attack fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's property — is the document that invented American conservation philosophy. The first section is a month-by-month account of a year on his Wisconsin farm, written with the precision of a field biologist and the patience of a man who has learned to pay attention. The second section is the argument: what he calls the land ethic, the proposition that humans are members of a community that includes soil, water, plants, and animals rather than its owners and managers. Around 228 pages and the philosophical foundation entry on this list. The reader who wants to understand where the American conservation movement came from — and what it originally argued before it became a political identity — comes here.
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Great Plains
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years driving the Great Plains — from the Canadian border to Texas, from the Missouri River to the Rockies — and wrote about what he found there with a humor and strangeness that makes this the funniest book on this list and one of the best American travel books ever written. Around 290 pages. The Plains are the part of America that everyone drives through on the way somewhere else, and Frazier's argument is that this is a mistake — that the emptiness is the point, that the specific flatness and vastness of the middle of the continent contains everything that makes America American. The humor entry and the American West entry simultaneously: Frazier is funny about history, funny about roadside America, funny about himself, and completely serious about the landscape underneath all of it. Cross-seeds with the American West History list.
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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.