"What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone ...Here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of nature." -Henry David Thoreau
Over a period of three years, Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He climbed mountains, paddled a canoe by moonlight, and dined on cedar beer, hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes constantly, Thoreau was just as likely to turn his observant eye to the habits and languages of the Abnaki Indians or the arduous life of the logger as he was to the workings of nature. He acutely observed the rivers,...

A remarkable firsthand view of a lost culture in all its simplicity and violence by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927 to 2014), author of the National Book Award winning The Snow Leopard and the novel In Paradise.
In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea live the Kurelu, a Stone Age tribe that survived into the twentieth century. Peter Matthiessen visited the Kurelu with the Harvard-Peabody Expedition in 1961 and wrote Under the Mountain Wall as an account not of the expedition, but of the great warrior Weaklekek, the swineherd Tukum, U-mue and...

A stirring tribute to one of America's most remote and beautiful places by one of the first modern preservationists
This Penguin Classic-Muir's first book-puts a pioneering conservationist's passion for nature in high relief. With a poet's sensitivity and a naturalist's eye, Muir celebrates the Sierra Nevada, which he dedicated his life to saving, and recounts his breathtaking visits to Yosemite Valley, Kings Canyon, Sequoia Groves, and Mount Whiskey. The Mountains of California is an affecting celebration of raw nature by one of its most ardent defenders.

In a luminous memoir of a life richly lived, one of America s finest writers explores the themes that have shaped his life and work: the glories of the natural world, the lure of working for a circus and fighting forest fires, the afflictions of temporary blindness and blocked speech, and the enduring influence of literary friendships, including John Berryman s, Edward Abbey s, and his mentor, Archibald MacLeish.
From his childhood in rural Connecticut to some of the earth s last remaining wildernesses, Hoagland has traveled the world wielding his unusual gift for observation. In...

In 1966, Edward Hoagland made a three-month excursion into the wild country of British Columbia and encountered a way of life that was disappearing even as he chronicled it. Showcasing Hoagland's extraordinary gifts for portraiture--his cast runs from salty prospector to trader, explorer, missionary, and indigenous guide--Notes from the Century Before is a breathtaking mix of anecdote, derring-do, and unparalleled elegy from one of the finest writers of our time.

In the late 1800s, John Muir made several trips to the pristine, relatively unexplored territory of Alaska, irresistibly drawn to its awe-inspiring glaciers and its wild menagerie of bears, bald eagles, wolves, and whales. Half-poet and half-geologist, he recorded his experiences and reflections in Travels in Alaska, a work he was in the process of completing at the time of his death in 1914. As Edward Hoagland writes in his Introduction, "A century and a quarter later, we are reading Muir's] account because there in the glorious fiords . . . he is at our elbow, nudging us along,...

"On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning", Thoreau wrote. J. Parker Huber is along for the climb, comparing what Thoreau saw in his era to what we can see today. Part of "The Spirit of Thoreau Series". 20-30 drawings by Thoreau.