SOURCE: Nash, Roderick. “The American Wilderness.” In Wilderness and the American Mind, 1967. Reprint, revised, pp. 67‐83. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

In the following essay, originally published in 1967 and then reprinted in a revised 1973 edition, Nash assesses the importance of the idea of wilderness to American culture and letters, discussing how nineteenth‐century writers such as William Cullen Bryant, James Kirke Paulding, and James Fenimore Cooper responded to the unique landscape of America.

Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe … the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.

Thomas Cole, 1836

While Romanticism was creating a climate of opinion in the new American nation in which wilderness could be appreciated, the fact of independence gave rise to a second major source of enthusiasm. It...