Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1989
Abstract
John Graves, a Texas-born naturalist, visited the Brazos River in north-central Texas in 1957, after a decade of world wandering, and wrote a farewell to a river, a book that has become a pastoral classic in American belles-lettres. Goodbye to a River has since been joined by two other nature volumes, and all three have earned for Graves a considerable reputation for his literary style. M. E. Bradford writes that Graves’s voice is “deceptively simple and disarmingly personal in its flavor” (“John Graves” 142). In his craft, he joins fellow Texans Roy Bedichek and J. Frank Dobie, and his name should be added to the list of contemporary nature writers—including Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Louis Bromfield, John McPhee, and Gary Snyder—for he has inherited that peculiar combination of autobiography, natural history, and philosophy which can be traced to early naturalists William Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir.
Recommended Citation
Crow Grover, Dorys. John Graves. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1989. Digital. Western Writers Series, 91.