The University of Wisconsin Press


Environment / Autobiography

 

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
John Muir
With a Foreword by Vernon Carstensen


"The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is one of the great human documents about life in frontier America—not another of those grim, barren accounts of pioneer hardship, but a record left by a man who was more than ordinarily aware of the great beauty of his surroundings."
Capital Times

John Muir—pioneer's son, naturalist, inventor extraordinaire—was one of the most fascinating and distinguished figures in American history and one of the country's best-known advocates of land preservation and the establishment of national parks.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is the first volume of John Muir's autobiography and the only part published before he died in 1914. 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.

"An inspiring pleasure to read. [It] show[s] the equal parts of objective observation and science, the sense of wonder at our earth, and the understanding of man's relation to it that comprise a conservation ethic."—Rachel Carson Council Reviews

 

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Of Related Interest:
Son of the Wilderness,
Linnie Marsh Wolfe

The new cover of Muir's book is illustrated with a photo of him in his later years.

May 1965
246 pp
.   4 3/4 x 7   9 illus.    

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Paper $24.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-03654-6
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