Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Native Americans - Paperback

by Richard F. Fleck (Author)

No two persons in the United States have written with as much passion and power about the bond between human beings and the natural world as Thoreau of WALDEN and Muir of MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA. For both, Native Americans best exemplified the innate need of the human spirit to merge with the primal wilderness. This is the first book to treat together and in depth these two great students of our natural America to explore Native American influence on the development not only of their--but America's--natural philosophies and environmental awareness.

Author Biography

Richard F. Fleck is author of Desert Rims to Mountains High, and also the foreword writer for the WestWinds Press Literary Naturalist Series. A professor of American literature for some fifty years, Fleck earned a PhD from the University of New Mexico (1970), and taught at the University of Wyoming, Osaka University, Japan, as well as Prescott College, the University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Bologna, Italy. At age seventy-five he remains active by climbing mountains and guiding Sierra Club hikes in Colorado and Utah and teaches occasional classes for Colorado Heights University. John Muir (April 21, 1838 - December 24, 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.