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University of California Press

The Grand Canyon Reader

by Lance Newman (Editor)
Hardcover Paperback
Price: $24.95 / £21.00
Publication Date: Oct 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780520270794
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 4 b/w drawings
Endowments:
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Grand Canyon

Amil Quayle

After working as a guide during the early years of commercial river-running in Grand Canyon, Amil Quayle ran a cattle ranch while he earned a doctorate in English from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and then he returned to his childhood home, a small house his father had built near the Henry's Fork of the Snake River in St. Anthony, Idaho. His two sons, Bruce and Manx, and two of his grandchildren, Eric and Kyndle, are now Grand Canyon river guides. Quayle's two award-winning books of poetry, Pebble Creek (1993) and Grand Canyon and Other Selected Poems (2009), draw on his family's long intimacy with the rugged landscapes and rural cultures of the American West. Most of his poems give readers a finely detailed and sometimes sorrowful view of the changes that have overtaken the West's human and natural communities during the last century. In this, the title poem of his second book, he digs even deeper into time, finding a metaphor for the shape and texture of his life experience in the geology of the Grand Canyon.

I speak now of that Grand Canyonwhich lies within each of us. Thereare pre-Cambrian rocks at the center,the core, and talus from yesterday’s fall;marble and granite grown hard from thepressure and heat of heartbreak andpassion; crumbling sandstone, layer onlayer of sediment, sentiment piled onover a lifetime’s experience. The sunbursts on us each morning then diesand we are in darkness, but moon shadowstease our walls. We listen to the pulsatingrhythm of time’s river lapping at ourshores. The sandy places slide, diffuse,move closer to the sea. A billion yearsof erosion is magnified, demagnified intosixty or seventy years as we measure time.Perhaps in a million years your shinbonewill be a fossil in another Grand Canyon,cold in a bed of rock next to mine.
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About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Stories of the Great Unknown

The Rim
Amil Quayle, Grand Canyon
Craig Childs, Fear of God
Ann Zwinger, Bright Angel Trail
Edward Abbey, Havasu
Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked through Time
Joseph Wood Krutch, Where Solitude Is Easy to Find
Theodore Roosevelt, A Cougar Hunt on the Rim of the Grand Canyon
John Muir, The Grand Cañon of the Colorado
Harriet Monroe, The Grand Cañon of the Colorado

The River
Sharlot Hall, The Song of the Colorado
Patricia McCairen, Canyon Solitude
Terry Tempest Williams, Stone Creek Woman
Barry Lopez, Gone Back into the Earth
John McPhee, A River
Bill Beer, Lava Falls
Bert Loper, Three Boys and an Old Man
George Flavell, The Log of the Panthon
John Wesley Powell, The Grand Cañon of the Colorado

The People
Michael Kabotie, Grand Canyon National Park
Linda Hogan, Plant Journey
Wallace Stegner, Packhorse Paradise
Joseph C. Ives, Mojave Valley to Big Canyon
Francisco Garcés, Mojave Crossing to Oraibe Pueblo
Pedro de Castañeda, The Hopi Mesas and the Colorado River
G.{ths}M. Mullett, The Story of Tiyo
Hualapai, Tudjupa Creates the People
Ramson Lomatewama, They Told Stories

Further Reading
Credits

Reviews

“The stories tell of the delight and wonder that is the Grand Canyon. . . . The timelessness of the canyon means that the excitement continues . . . and ‘The Grand Canyon Reader’ takes us along for the ride.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Word of warning: Reading the essays in this book will make you want to drop everything and traverse the Grand Canyon, rim-to-rim, if only to avoid the tourists hovering. But, with offerings from the likes of John McPhee, Barry Lopez, Wallace Stegner and that curmudgeon Edward Abbey, it also makes you think.”
— Sacramento Bee
“A great new compilation of short stories, essays, and poetry regaling the Grand Canyon. . . . Mr. Newman has pulled together in one book a rich collection of stories that bring to life the river and its surrounding canyon, and keeps it alive.”
— National Parks Traveler
“As soon as I began reading the Introduction to The Grand Canyon Reader, I knew I was going to like this book. . . . [Newman is] the ideal editor to put together an anthology of canyon poetry and prose. . . . I recommend The Grand Canyon Reader quite enthusiastically.”
— Interdisciplinary Studies In Literature And Environment
"Wondrous accounts by some of the most famous enviromentalists and nature writers of recent times."
— Rain Taxi
“I’ve been on his raft in the Grand Canyon, so I can attest to the fact that Lance Newman can row through both the currents of the Colorado River and the many literary tributaries that have given us great literature on this most unique of American places. The canyon is so many things to so many people: a holy land, an incision into the deep time of geology; a place of great and dangerous adventure; an imperiled landscape and a site in which to think about what our relationship to the natural world could and should be. Newman’s superb anthology gives us splendid selections that carry the reader along on the current of the best and most varied nature writing.” —Rebecca Solnit, author Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

“To really understand the wonders of the Grand Canyon, we need to see it through the eyes of others. In this reader, Lance Newman opens that world to us. The Grand Canyon of Craig Childs is a long way from that of Colin Fletcher, not to mention John Muir or Joseph Ives, but Newman guides us confidently through all these perspectives and many more. He has selected well, and we are the richer for it. Read this book.” —William C. Tweed, author of Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks

“These are the Canyon’s literary ‘greatest hits’ alongside lesser known but extremely interesting accounts. Demonstrating an impressively refreshing range of perspectives and experiences, this is a remarkable anthology of 500 years of human interaction with the Canyon.” —Michael Branch, co-author of The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mounts and Shenandoah Valley