This comprehensive book on American nature writing introduces the
reader to how American nature writing develops, and gives a systematic
and telling review of the representative authors and their works, with a
well-selected bibliography. It starts with the concept, origin and features
of nature writing, and goes into details about these authors, from John
Smith, William Bradford, Jonathan Edwards and William Bartram of the
New World Era, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, to female
writers of Susan F. Cooper, Celia Thaxter and Mabel Osgood Wright, and
to Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder of the times.
Its motif is to tell a story of the land, to explore the atlas of the human
soul and of nature, and to chronicle a literature that blends history of
nature with that of human development.