Wild Animal Story, The

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Philippon, Daniel J

The Wild Animal Story. Edited by Ralph H. Lutts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. xi 302-pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $349.

Part of the Temple University Press series on Animals, Culture, and Society, The Wild Animal Story, edited by Ralph H. Lutts, is an invaluable sourcebook of information about the "nature fakers" controversy that engaged many of the leading figures in natural history at the turn of the century. It contains an introduction by Lutts, a sampling of nature tales, a collection of historical documents about the controversy, five interpretive essays, and a gallery of fifteen illustrations.

In his introduction, Lutts documents the emergence of the wild animal story in late-nineteenth-century Canadian literature and its flourishing in popular culture in the early-twentieth-century United States. Perhaps best understood as a literary response to Darwinism, these stories portrayed animals who lived for their own ends (rather than for human ends, as previously occurred in animal stories), but who also rose above their animal instincts to exhibit such human characteristics as sympathy, conscience, and rationality. As Lutts points out, the questions raised by these storiesabout fact and fiction, reason and instinct, science and emotion-persisted into modern times with the rebirth of the genre in the 1940s in the work of Sally Carrighar and Rachel Carson, the introduction of a distinctly environmental perspective in the stories of Farley Mowat and others in the 196os, and the transformation of the genre in the late twentieth century in such films as The Bear (1989), Free Willy (1993), and Fly Away Home (1996).

The first section of The Wild Animal Story includes ten examples of wild animal stories: two each by the genre's founders, Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton; three by its embattled defender, William J. Long; and one each by Jack London (from Call of the Wild), John Muir (Stickeen), and Rachel Carson (from Under the Sea-Wind). Many of these stories are now considered classics, and they are nicely supplemented by several prefaces by Roberts, Seton, and Long, in which these writers attempt to articulate their methods and philosophies. Section two contains thirteen key documents in the controversy, including John Burroughs's opening salvo, Long's strongly worded reply, and additional responses by W. H. Hudson, Mabel Osgood Wright, Theodore Roosevelt, and others. The third, interpretive section of the book collects important scholarly essays on the genre by Margaret Atwood, Robert H. MacDonald, and Lutts, as well as two essays by Thomas Dunlap and Ronald Limbaugh that originally appeared in Forest and Conservation History and Environmental History Review. Each of these three sections also contains a brief introduction by Lutts, and the gallery of illustrations includes photographs of many of the writers discussed, artwork from their books, and editorial cartoons generated by the controversy. A detailed index rounds out the volume.

Given the inaccessibility of many of the documents it collects, as well as the thoroughness with which it presents them, The Wild Animal Story would make an excellent classroom resource, especially if a paperback edition eventually becomes available.

Reviewed by Daniel J. Philippon. Mr. Philippon is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where he teaches courses on nature writing, religion, science, and environmental studies. He is coeditor of The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley (Johns Hopkins Universit Press, 1998) and editor ofThe Friendship of Nature, by Mabel Osgood Wright (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).