Edited by Robert Finch/John Elder
Norton, 1990
Man's encounter with nature has produced some of the great literature of our time. Darwin's ruminations on the Galapagos Islands, Melville's exploration of the "whiteness of the whale," and Thoreau's communion with Walden Pond are monuments in the history of writing and thought. The Norton Book of Nature Writing,including 125 selections by 94 writers, is the first definitive and comprehensive collection of the many voices of nature writing which have flourished in England and America over the last two hundred years.
Here one will find such classic and enduring selections as William Bartram's thrilling parley with crocodiles in south Florida, John Hay's sublime exchange with a dying Arctic dovekie, and John Muir's riding out a mountain wind-storm in the lofty branches of a silver pine.
Eloquent contemporary nature writing also abounds: in Richard Nelson's moving appreciation of the hunted deer, Edward Hoagland's capture, in words only, of the elusive mountain lion, and Annie Dillard's sagacity and wit brought to bear on the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Here too are pieces from "unexpected" nature writers, such as Thomas Merton's brilliant discourse on rain and existential rhinoceri, John Updike's lively rendering of a thunderstorm in New York City, and Ursula K. Le Guin's interpretation of the mythmaking that surrounded the eruption of Mount St. Helens, "a very warm mountain," as well as selections from Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence.
The Norton Book of Nature Writingpresents nature in all the incarnations --prickly, chaotic, generous, cruel, mysterious, and heartbreaking -- that have inspired men and women to portray it in words. Editors Robert Finch and John Elder have brought together in prose the panorama of the natural world. At once entertaining and enlightening, these essays are characterized not so much by similar subject matter, which ranges from distant galaxies to the microbiology of cells, as by the lively and sympathetic personalities of their authors. In the scope, variety, and strength of these selections we have one of the most significant and enduring literary genres of the past two centuries.
ROBERT FINCH is the author of Common Ground, The Primal Place, Outlands: Journeys to the Outer Edges of Cape Cod,and numerous articles for various magazines. He is presently at work editing a collection of Cape Cod literature.
JOHN ELDER is a professor of English at Middlebury College and at the Bread Loaf School of English. His books include Imagining the Earth:, Poetry and the Vision of Nature.
Contributors
* Gilbert White * Hector St. John de Crevecoeur * WilliamBartram * Alexander Wilson * John Leonard Knapp * Dorothy Wordsworth * Samuel Taylor Coleridge * Charles Waterton * Washington Irving * John James Audubon * John Clare * George Catlin * Ralph Waldo Emerson * Charles Darwin * Henry David Thoreau * Charles Kingsley * Herman Melville * John Ruskin * Walt Whitman * Jean Henri Fabre * Alfred Russel Wallace * John Wesley Powell * Samuel Clemens * John Burroughs * John Muir * W. H. Hudson * Clarence King * Henry James * Gerard Manley Hopkins * Richard Jefferies * Mary Austin * Edward Thomas * Rockwell Kent * Virginia Woolf * Isak Dinesen * D. H. Lawrence * Henry Beston * Aldo Leopold * Gustav Eckstein * Joseph Wood Krutch * Donald Culross Peattie * Sigurd Olson * Edwin Way Teale * E. B. White * Meridel LeSueur * Rend Dubos * Norman Maclean * John Steinbeck * George Orwell * Laurens Van Der Post * T. H. White * Rachel Carson * Loren Eiseley * Archie Carr * Wallace Stegner * Jacquetta Hawkes * LewisThomas * Gavin Maxwell * John Hay * Thomas Merton * John Graves * William Warner * Farley Mowat * John Haines * Ann Haymond * Zwinger * J. A. Baker * John Fowles * Franklin Russell * Edward Abbey * Peter Matthiessen * Richard Selzer * Ursula K. Le Guin * Edward 0. Wilson * John McPhee * John G. Mitchell * Edward Hoagland * JohnUpdike * Wendell Berry * N. Scott Momaday * Sue Hubbell * Chet Raymo * Richard K. Nelson * Robert Finch * Peter Steinhart * Annie Dillard * Barry Lopez * David Rains Wallace * Gretel Ehrlich * Robert Michael Pyle * David Quammen * Leslie Mannon Silko * Vicki Hearne * Gary Paul Nabhan * Terry Tempest Williams