Among the nature writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Rick Bass is perhaps the most ardent, the most outspoken, and the most visible environmental activist and defender of wildness. Critical perceptions of Bass's work are scant, owing perhaps to both the usual time lag between an artist's work and the publication of substantial criticism and to a perception of the nonfiction form that makes up the bulk of his work as somehow less than literary. Yet, each of the books Bass has published since The Deer Pasture first appeared in 1985 has been widely reviewed in venues ranging from Mother Jones to The New York Times.

Bass began his literary career while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, but found his true voice and calling only after his 1987 move to the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana. Born on 7 March 1958 in Fort Worth, Texas, one...