Search Results: Americans & Nature from Monongahela Books

Trade paperback, NF condition. ~~~ Introduction, essays, annotations, bibliography, index, 390 pages. ~~~ With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. ~~ Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world,… Read More

NEW copy. Hardcover with laminated, illustrated covers (issued without dust jacket. Illustrated, notes, index, 129 pages. OUT OF PRINT. ---
Allusions to the sea permeate Thoreau's writings, enriching many of his basic ideas. Harp on the Shore examines Thoreau's use of maritime metaphor. It shows how he, a writer ordinarily perceived as quintessentially landlocked, came to view the terrestrial world in terms of the oceanic.
The book explores both the poetic and the philosophical implications of Thoreau's passion for the sea. Beginning with Thoreau's deep attachment to the sea and maritime life in New England and the ways in which that attachment stimulated his imaginative identification of Concord as a center of maritime activity, it examines the sea voyage as a symbol of man's intellectual processes. The book shows how maritime allusions enlarge the significance of Thoreau's ideas about man's struggle to attain individuality and identity, his notion of Homeric or Edenic man, and his belief in a middle… Read More

VG. Remainder mark on bottom edge of book, otherwise a clean, tight copy. ~~~ Illustrations, Chronology, Principal sources, Notes, Index, 455 pages. ~~~ The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau's manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau's life and achievement in their full nineteenth century context.

NEW copy, trade paperback. Introductory essay by BJ Omanson, photographs by Jared Carter, 57 pages. ~~~ "Jared Carter's poetry -- in its fidelity both to the letter and the spirit of the land -- does something that art should never lose sight of: it adheres so scrupulously to the world as it is, to the 'local habitation' in all its distinctiveness, particularity and long extent of its history, that it assumes the very form and character of that region, is shaped and scoured by it, and so becomes a true expression of the land itself."

Trade paperback in Near Fine condition. ~~~ Illustrated, introduction by Douglas H. Strong, notes, bibliography, index, 250 pages. ~~~ Hans Huth was for many years Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a consultant for the U.S. National Park Service. --- For this new Bison Book edition, Douglas H. Strong has written an introduction discussing recent developments in the environmental movement and the contribution of Nature and the American to the burgeoning crusade for nature.

Consisting of over fifty poems, from short lyrics in a variety of forms to lengthy blank verse and free verse narratives, "Stark County Poems" portrays the history of a small rural county in central Illinois, along the upper Spoon River valley. ~~ Chronologically arranged, and incorporating letters, newspaper articles, obituaries, family stories, early county histories and diaries, the poems cover a century of the county's history, from the 1830s through the 1930s. ~~ BJ Omanson was raised in the Spoon River valley of Stark County, Illinois, where both sides of his family have lived and farmed since the mid-19th century. ~~ He has published poetry, literary criticism, regional and military history.

In his memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road, BJ Omanson recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry-- a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and-- as he was a high-school dropout-- nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia. ---- In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle's WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. ---- He would spend the winter camping in a primitive shelter in an alder glade above the Calawah river,… Read More

NF/NF. Hardcover with dust jacket in 'as new' condition ~~~ Illustrated end pages (map), introduction, related passages, a Thoreau chronology, glossary of botanical terms, a note on the provenance of the manuscript, manuscript facsimile, 90-odd pages of notes, works cited, index, 409 pages. ~~~ Thoreau's Walden (1854) is regarded both as a masterpiece of American prose and as a forerunner of modern environmentalism. Its author spent much of the 1850s learning what botany could teach him about the New England woods he chronicled. Thoreau brought that knowledge to bear on this sometimes very beautiful essay about plants, fruits and nuts, left incomplete at his death in 1862 and here printed for the first time. Thoreau's brief preface echoes the passions of Walden: "What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?" The rest of the work is arranged fruit by fruit: we begin with elm-fruit ("most mistake the fruit before it falls for leaves, and we owe to it the first… Read More