John Muir's Radiant Vision

Catalog description

John Muir (1838-1914) was a prophetic defender of wild nature, and an internationally celebrated champion of environmental preservation. Known as "The Father of the National Parks" and the Founding President of the Sierra Club, he was a powerful political and cultural force; he was also a mesmerizing story-teller, speaker, and writer. This seminar will focus on Muir's most exuberant and rhapsodic writing, all about the place he loved most in the world, California's Sierra Nevada mountains -- what he called "The Range of Light." We'll start with two autobiographical texts that explain how the Scottish immigrant Muir became "John of the Mountains." We'll spread our view to bring in contemporaries and near-contemporaries whom he admired ? Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Robert Burns, and John Ruskin ? and we'll look at the painters and photographers who were drawn to the Sierras with him: Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Finally, we'll spend time with some of the writers and artists who were profoundly influenced by Muir's work -- Everett Ruess, Ansel Adams, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Kilion, and Kim Stanley Robinson - and we'll read the prize-winning biography by Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.