Books like All the Wild That Remains

Every discussion about the evolution of writing in ‘the West’ has to start with Willa Cather, who was the first writer from the west to be awarded a major literary award when she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, which isn’t even one of her five best novels. Cather wrote openly about alcoholism, domestic violence, and other painful topics, transforming western writing from cardboard cutout characters to real people. My Ántonia has become an American classic, not just in western literature but in all literature. My Ántonia is told from the point of view of a young farm boy who falls in love with the enchanting Ántonia, and it’s beautifully written, taking us into the emotional heart of youth and idealism in the West.

When I read the opening sentences of A Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt, the character of Win Avery in my own book was born in my imagination. Kuralt wrote: “There is no contentment on the road, and little enough fulfillment. I know that now. I am acquainted with people who live settled lives and find deep gratification in family and home. I know what I have missed...the generations together at the table, the pleasures of kinship, the rituals of the hearth. And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforeseen encounters and unexpected sights…No train leaves the station that I do not want to catch.” His words are as sad as they are thrilling and they move me every time I read them.

Duncan follows the route Lewis and Clark took as they headed up the Missouri River. He embarks on the trip several generations later and drives a camper, so he experiences a very different landscape from the early explorers. It doesn’t matter; while the book itself is thirty-five years old, his blend of history, traveler’s and camping advice, and personal encounters make this memoir insightful, funny, and poignant even now. For anyone who would prefer to take a road trip from the comfort of their favorite reading chair, this is a satisfying read.

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

I first heard these words from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at a Berkeley Poets Cooperative workshop in 1972. I was intrigued and had to read Whitman’s work myself! Up until this point, my primary influences as a poet had been the Romantics (especially Keats, Shelley, and Byron), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Whitman was a revelation. He showed me not only that a poet could write in an entirely different way, but also that an individual can encompass and represent vastness. When Whitman reveals his name in “Song of Myself,” he includes the whole universe in a single breath: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” 

I loved this book because it takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy within the United States and shows how the richest are exploiting the natural environment in Teton County, Wyoming, to solve personal existential crises.

The author managed to get incredible access to prominent tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, and other ultra-high-net-worth individuals who have moved to a place where they can profit from their environmental philanthropy while also contributing to ever-widening economic inequality by privatizing public goods. I thought this book provided a fair yet fascinating insight into the contradictions of philanthropy, which allow the rich to donate in ways that absolve themselves from the guilt of the inequality that they contribute to. 

This book was released when I was starting my own work on mining history, and it greatly influenced everything I have written since. I love how LeCain traces how the demand for copper to electrify American cities led to the creation of massive holes such as the Bingham and Berkeley pits.

For me, the crux of the book is the idea that, as the quality of copper ore declined, mining companies used more energy and brute force machinery to dig unimaginably large open pits, producing landscape scars and toxic legacies that are still with us today. It makes visible the immense cost of America’s great industrial acceleration. 

For decades, Jack Loeffler and Ed Abbey were best friends. Nearly fifteen years after Abbey’s death, Loeffler wrote about their friendship and their time exploring the Desert Southwest in this beautiful biographical memoir.

Loeffler takes us on some of the countless backpacking trips the two men went on while also revealing the many complexities of Abbey. This beautiful book lets us lean in and listen to Loeffler and Abbey talking about anarchism and environmentalism around so many campfires. I had the pleasure of interviewing Loeffler, and this book sounds so authentic to him.

It is smart, passionate, and kind, just like Loeffler is. 

She’s a super-smart Civil War historian, and this book does something I haven’t seen in a lot of Civil War books—it shows how important the West was to the way the US developed after the Civil War—it wasn’t just that the nation expanded, but she writes about how both the North and South relied on racial hierarchies, and she centers Native Americans, which I think is a really important part of that story.

Mark Twain is my writing idol. Before Roughing it, I’d never read a book written during the Civil War era which didn’t take sides and grind axes. From it, I learned detachment, that personal adventures can live side-by-side with even the most earth-shattering events. And that hilarious stories like “Bemis and the Buffalo” are the best antidote for the chaos and pain of war.

Posthumously published in 1970 by the University of Illinois Press, this is a must-have for anyone interested in the early years of the western migration. Unruh — who died young shortly after completing the manuscript —performs the essential task of assembling credible data about emigrants and Native Americans, and — most importantly — about their encounters with each other. Popular myths and Hollywood movies notwithstanding, Unruh makes clear that Native Americans seldom caused emigrants much harm. Indeed, emigrants of the 1840s were more likely to shoot themselves and each other by accident than require a gun for self-defense.