Nature & Environment

Atlantic, The, May, 2006

America's single greatest claim to literary pre-eminence may lie in its writings about the natural world. Writers in every corner of the globe have always told stories of relationships among people, or among peoples and their gods. But Americans came to full literary consciousness while much of their land was yet to be deforested, drained, cleared, developed. It is the fraught relationship between man and nature that suffuses many of the best American novels, poems, and stories—and that many of the most eloquent and impassioned American essays take as their central subject.

The voices showcased here gave rise to movements. Out walking in the wilderness, birthing a million backpackers who would follow, Henry David Thoreau was the proto- environmentalist. And John Muir,...