From the “dean of Western writers” (The New York Times) and the Pulitzer Prize winning–author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, a fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner recounts the sucesses and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West and spent a good deal of his life overcoming Washington politics in getting his message across. Only now, we may recognize just how accurate a prophet he was.
This text is a magisterial account of John Wesley Powell, the great American explorer and environmental pioneer. It tells the true story of undaunted courage in the American West.
Recommended by The Nature Conservancy magazine. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian offers a literary and thought-provoking look at ranching and its role in the changing West. The book's lyrical and deeply felt narratives, combined with fresh information and analysis, offer a poignant and enlightening consideration of ranchers' ecological commitments to the land, their cultural commitments to American society, and the economic role ranching plays in sustainable food production and the protection of biodiversity. The book begins with writings that bring to life the culture of ranching, including the fading reality of families living and working together on their land generation after generation. The middle section offers an understanding of the ecology of ranching, from issues of overgrazing and watershed damage to the concept that grazing animals can actually help restore degraded land. The final section addresses the economics of ranching in the face of declining commodity prices and rising land values brought by the increasing suburbanization of the West. Among the contributors are Paul Starrs, Linda Hasselstrom, Bob Budd, Drummond Hadley, Mark Brunson, Wayne Elmore, Allan Savory, Luther Propst, and Bill Weeks. Livestock ranching in the West has been attacked from all sides -- by environmentalists who see cattle as a scourge upon the land, by fiscal conservatives who consider the leasing of grazing rights to be a massive federal handout program, and by developers who covet intact ranches for subdivisions and shopping centers. The authors acknowledge that, if done wrong, ranching clearly has the capacity to hurt the land. But if done right, it has the power to restore ecological integrity to Western lands that have been too-long neglected. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian makes a unique and impassioned contribution to the ongoing debate on the future of the New West.
A book of timeless importance about the American West and a modern classic by National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Wallace Stegner. The essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches collected in The Sound of Mountain Water encompass memoir, nature conservation, history, geography, and literature. Compositions delve into the post-World War II boom that brought the Rocky Mountain West--from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Nevada--into the modern age. Other works feature eloquent sketches of the West's history and environment, directing our imagination to the sublime beauty of such places as Robbers Roost and Glen Canyon. A final section examines the state of Western literature, of the mythical past and the diminished present, and analyzesd the difficulties facing any contemporary Western writer. Written over a period of twenty-five years, a time in which the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, and by a writer and thinker who will always hold a unique position in modern American letters, The Sound of Mountain Water is a hymn to the Western landscape, an affirmation of the hope emobided therein, and a careful and rich investigation of the West's complex legacy.
“A convincing case for Powell’s legacy as a pioneering conservationist.”--The Wall Street Journal "A bold study of an eco-visionary at a watershed moment in US history."--Nature A timely, thrilling account of the explorer who dared to lead the first successful expedition down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon—and waged a bitterly-contested campaign for sustainability in the West. John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition—starving, battered, and nearly naked—they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before. With The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John F. Ross tells how that perilous expedition launched the one-armed Civil War hero on the path to becoming the nation’s foremost proponent of environmental sustainability and a powerful, if controversial, visionary for the development of the American West. So much of what he preached—most broadly about land and water stewardship—remains prophetically to the point today.
Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of personal, historical, and geographic discovery Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family. "Cause for celebration . . . A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly "Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enchantment of life." —Los Angeles Times This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jackson J. Benson. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Seeing Things Whole presents the essence of the extraordinary legacy that John Wesley Powell has left to the American people, and to people everywhere who strive to reconcile the demands of society with the imperatives of the land.
Thompson, a Georgia native, asserts that the South has drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform itself. She spent years traveling through the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.
