Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1989
Abstract
Joseph Wood Krutch’s first encounter with the West was a turning point in his life. In his autobiography, More Lives Than One, he says, “No sooner were we speeding along the roller coaster road which leads across the undulating desert towards Albuquerque than I felt a sudden lifting of the heart. It seemed almost as though I had lived there in some happier previous existence and was coming back home” (308). This sense of being at home was to lead him to abandon his academic life at Columbia University as well as his position as prominent critic of the New York theater in order to move to the desert near Tucson. There he would become an articulate spokesman for the essential value of man’s relationship to his natural environment. This brief study serves as an introduction to his nature writing and social criticism after the mid-1940s when he had come under the influence of both Thoreau and the Southwest. My main focus will be an examination of his work from the last two decades of his life when he had become one of the foremost intellectuals in America.
Recommended Citation
Pavich, Paul N. Joseph Wood Krutch. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1989. Digital. Western Writers Series, 89.