John Muir Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Muir

John Muir is one of the most important figures in the history of the American conservation movement. A self-styled "poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc!-!-!," he remains a strong influence on environmentalists, and except for the influence of literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau and poet Gary Snyder, the regard of environmentalists for Muir is unrivaled. He is most often associated with the Yosemite Valley and the mountains of California; Muir joyfully describes these places and his adventures in them. In a passage that bestows on the Sierra Nevada a nickname still widely used, Muir writes with an enthusiasm for the natural world that is as luminous as the mountains he describes: "After ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have seen."

At other times, especially later in his career when he directed his energies toward preserving large blocks of American wilderness in the form of national parks, Muir's tone can reach the prophetic pitch of a raging Jeremiah.

Read the rest of this Biography with our John Muir Access Pass.