To Pass On a Good Earth is the candid and compelling new biography of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive and influential scholars. The legendary -Great God beyond the Sierras, - Carl Ortwin Sauer is America's most famed geographer, an inspiration to both academics and poets, yet no book-length biography of him has existed until now.

This Missouri-born son of German immigrants contributed to many fields, with a versatility rare in his time and virtually unknown today. Sauer explored plant and animal domestication, the entry of Native Americans into the continent,...