The Spirit of the Desert West: Reading List by Stephen Trimble, author of The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin; and The People: Indians of the American Southwest
Read more about the author of this list
First, you have to get there, and no one gets you there better than Bernard deVoto in, The Year of Decision: 1846, a sprawling, quirky, emphatic history of the overlanders.
Then you have to explore the country--with John Wesley Powell, in Wallace Stegner's essential Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
And, finally, you need to grapple with change:Atlas of the
New West
by William Riebsame (ed.) introduces the two crucial commentators, Patty Limerick
and Charles Wilkinson.
You are now in the Desert West--the Interior West, the West of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Intermountain West, and the Desert Southwest. Each of these regions has its own reading list. Here are a few of my favorites, some classics, some obscure--all required reading to know where you are, to inform your conception of home. (I'll limit myself to a single title by each author; but these are arbitrary. Go on to search out the rest of each writer's work.)
Desert Solitaire:
A Season in the Wilderness
by Edward Abbey (a feisty declaration of love for the
Four Corners canyon country, and fundamental scripture for activist environmentalists)
The City of Trembling Leaves
by Walter van Tilburg Clark (growing up in Reno; captures
the feel of small Western cities embedded in the enormous Western space)
Out of Print
This House
of Sky, Landscapes of a Western Mind
by Ivan Doig (exquisite memoir of a sheepherding childhood
in Montana; an exploration of the Western soul)
Land Circle:
Writings Collected from the Land
by Linda Hasselstrom (a woman's life in the ranching
wilderness; full of authentic emotion)
Who Owns the
West?
by William Kittredge (the crucial question in the year
2000)
Winter Count
by Barry Lopez (still my favorite introduction to Lopez's
work; suggestive, mysterious stories)
Woven Stone
by Simon Ortiz (the strongest American Indian voice in
the Southwest; from Acoma Pueblo)
Annals of the
Former World
by John McPhee (the nature of the land; geology here
becomes a bedrock story in our lives)
Gathering the Desert
by Gary Paul Nabhan (the Sonoran Desert as home rather
than barrens)
The Milagro
Beanfield War
by John Nichols (still the best story of tricultural
northern New Mexico)
Cadillac Desert
by Mark Reisner (why water matters)
Fools Crow
by James Welch (powerfully recreates the traditional
lives of Blackfoot Indian people)
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