The John Muir Library
9 total works
John Muir first saw Alaska in 1879, only twelve years after it was purchased from Russia by the United States. Four more times, in 1880, 1881, 1890, and 1899, he was drawn back to this land of rivers and glaciers, sunsets and northern lights, campfires and Arctic stars. Few people have lived so many adventures, yet Muir was not a mere collector of adventure; the hazards he encountered - and many were spine tingling - came as a result of his intense desire to examine new aspects of the natural world.
Muir kept this Journal on his first extended trip to Yosemite in 1869. Here he faithfully recorded his impressions of the dazzling animal and plant life he encountered in the magnificant Sierra.
Muir recounts in vivid detail the three worlds of his early life: his first eleven years in Scotland; the years 1849-1860 in the central Wisconsin wilderness; and two-and-a-half most inventive years at the University of Wisconsin during that institution's infancy.
Here is the adventure that started John Muir on a lifetime of discovery. Taken from his earliest journals, this book records Muir's walk in 1867 from Indiana across Kentucky. Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to the Gulf Coast. In his distinct and wonderful style, Muir shows us the wilderness, as well as the towns and people, of the South immediately after the Civil War. Founder of the Sierra Club, and its president until his death, Muir was a spirit so free that all he did to prepare for an expedition was to "throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump over the back Fence." In a world confronting the deterioration of the natural environment and an ever-quickening pace of life, the attraction of Muir's writings has never been greater.
When John Muir traveled to California in 1868, he found the pristine mountain ranges that would inspire his life’s work. The Mountains of California is the culmination of the ten years Muir spent in the Sierra Nevadas, studying every crag, crook, and valley with great care and contemplation.
Bill McKibben writes in his Introduction that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild . . . a language of ecstasy and exuberance."
The Mountains of California is as vibrant and vital today as when it was written over a century ago.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes the photographs and line drawings from the original 1898 edition.
Bill McKibben writes in his Introduction that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild . . . a language of ecstasy and exuberance."
The Mountains of California is as vibrant and vital today as when it was written over a century ago.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes the photographs and line drawings from the original 1898 edition.
Steep Trails
by John Muir, William Frederic Bad, Edgar M 1897-1968 Queeny, and William Frederic Bade
Published 1 January 1990
No one wrote about nature with more eloquence or passion than John Muir, and this collection of essays, spanning nearly three decades of his work, shows him at his best. These writings about his travels to the lakes, canyons, and mountains of the American West make a fitting addition to the John Muir Library Series, our ongoing program to reissue the complete works of the first great conservationist author. The two dozen magazine articles and letters in this collection present the natural treasures of an unspoiled land as white settlers found them a century ago: the Great Salt Lake, the San Gabriel Mountains, Mount Rainer, the Grand Canyon.Here are Muir's accounts of a "perilous night" caught in a snowstorm on the summit of Mount Shasta; his rapture at sailing through Puget Sound and seeing the forests of Washington (as well as his ire, describing the proliferating lumber mills, at "this fierce storm of steel that is devouring our forest"); "A Geologist's Winter Walk" in Yosemite, where he found a "living glacier" with which to prove his controversial theory that glacial erosion had formed Yosemite Valley; "the feathered people" - golden eagles, ospreys, hawks, jays, hummingbirds, and others - "sailing the sky and enlivening the rocks and bushes through all the (Grand Canyon) wilderness"; and much more.
Filled with Muir's characteristic boldness and emotion, these stirring essays will appeal to his loyal readers today, just as they did a century ago.
Filled with Muir's characteristic boldness and emotion, these stirring essays will appeal to his loyal readers today, just as they did a century ago.
In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for means of support to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region. A ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. As he explored the region, he jotted down his keen observations of the scenic countryside, and he eventually became a guide for some of Yosemite’s most famous visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Muir documented these experiences in The Yosemite, first published in 1912. It is at once a vivid, accurate description of the land and a passionate homage to nature.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is a facsimile of the 1912 edition and includes the original illustrations.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is a facsimile of the 1912 edition and includes the original illustrations.
Our National Parks is a guidebook supreme, an exciting introduction to Yosemite and several other magnificent parks by the man who, more than any other person, helped to create them. After this fast-paced trip with Muir, past visitors to the parks will want to revisit them with new insights, and those who have never wandered these trails will not rest until they have done so.
The book, long out of print, was originally published in 1901, its ten essays having previously appeared as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them with a single purpose-to entice people, by his descriptions, to come to the parks, to see and enjoy them. If enough people did so, reasoned Muir, they would surely love the wilderness as he did, and the parks would be preserved.
Muir carried out his public relations mission with remarkable success. Every page of this book carries his unbridled and irresistible enthusiasm. Our National Parks is part reminiscence, part philosophy, and mostly enticing description. It is all vintage Muir.
Although the book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., Muir devotes the bulk of the work to his first love-Yosemite, settled into the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, six of the book's chapters are devoted to Yosemite, treating the forests, wild gardens, fountains and streams, animals, and birds of the park. The concluding essay is an impassioned plea to save American forests.
All visitors to the great western national parks-and all who will one day visit them-will be captivated by Muir's descriptions. The grandeur of this wilderness is reflected in the very spirit of John Muir. Both shine through every page of this remarkable book.
The book, long out of print, was originally published in 1901, its ten essays having previously appeared as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them with a single purpose-to entice people, by his descriptions, to come to the parks, to see and enjoy them. If enough people did so, reasoned Muir, they would surely love the wilderness as he did, and the parks would be preserved.
Muir carried out his public relations mission with remarkable success. Every page of this book carries his unbridled and irresistible enthusiasm. Our National Parks is part reminiscence, part philosophy, and mostly enticing description. It is all vintage Muir.
Although the book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., Muir devotes the bulk of the work to his first love-Yosemite, settled into the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, six of the book's chapters are devoted to Yosemite, treating the forests, wild gardens, fountains and streams, animals, and birds of the park. The concluding essay is an impassioned plea to save American forests.
All visitors to the great western national parks-and all who will one day visit them-will be captivated by Muir's descriptions. The grandeur of this wilderness is reflected in the very spirit of John Muir. Both shine through every page of this remarkable book.