The Grand Canyon Reader

This superb anthology brings together some of the most powerful and compelling writing about the Grand Canyon—stories, essays, and poems written across five centuries by people inhabiting, surviving, and attempting to understand what one explorer called the "Great Unknown." The Grand Canyon Reader includes traditional stories from native tribes, reports by explorers, journals by early tourists, and contemporary essays and stories by such beloved writers as John McPhee, Ann Zwinger, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Linda Hogan, and Craig Childs. Lively tales written by unschooled river runners, unabashedly popular fiction, and memoirs stand alongside finely crafted literary works to represent full range of human experience in this wild, daunting, and inspiring landscape.

Lance Newman, Professor of English at Westminster College, has worked as a Grand Canyon river guide for twenty years. He is the author of Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature as well as two chapbooks of poems, 3by3by3 and Come Kanab: A Little Red Songbook.